Artificial realness

I've long been fascinated by the role of accents as cultural signifiers in popular music styles--you know, how if you want to sing honky-tonk you adopt a twang even if you were born in New Jersey or Kent. So this article on cultural appropriation in the work of flavour-of-the-week hip-hop diva Iggy Azalea from Mullumbimby, Oz was right up my alley. The author goes through a long laundry list of non-Black artists from Elvis to Winehouse who drew heavily from African-American influences when crafting their personal vocal styles and finally concludes:

But each one of these artists have made a voice that was their own, with their own soul. Even when they used the Afro-American Vernacular English and inflections running throughout soul music – the black accent, or blaccent. Iggy Azalea fails D[on't] F[ake] T[he] F[unk] for me because she's all blaccent, no soul. Yes, she cops to her influences any minute, but she has to because she made up a dead-center black voice. She didn't bend her Australian voice to incorporate some blaccent features. She went all the way. Or, too far.

I've never really seen anyone spell out the fine gradations of inauthenticity in quite this way. Personally, I've always found Mick's pseudo-Southern delivery exaggerated to point of parody as well, but here is where extralinguistic considerations apparently entre the calculus:

There's a difference between the whitewashed pre-Beatles American pop world, and the guys who appeared to be more open about their influences and giving credit to black musicians....I've seen Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and The Rolling Stones pay alongside Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Muddy Waters.

Which makes me wonder: If Azalea had come to prominence the same way that, say, Nicky Minaj did--by guesting on tracks by big names in the genre--would Pittman and others be inclined to cut her some more slack? Interesting question, but ultimately unanswerable.