Doprah is a New Zealand duo consisting of producer Steven Marr and singer Indira Force. They opened for Lorde during her post-Grammy homecoming show, went No. 1 on the alternative chart in NZ, and they’re yet another product of a thriving New Zealand music scene. You can find more of their music here.
The band’s latest music video is for “Stranger People,” and it’s appropriately out-there. Inspired by J-pop visuals, directors THUNDERLIPS (Jordan Dodson and Sean Wallace, also from New Zealand) defend their journey into other cultures:
Our stance on cultural appropriation is that it’s great, and in this case doubly great for creating a cycle of appropriation by appropriating from the greatest of cultural appropriators: the Japanese. They’ve borrowed from the West, and now we’re re-borrowing their half-borrowed medium—whose culture is really discernible in J-pop? It’s an appropriated medium! The sitcom we made for Randa is an equally blatant appropriation of a medium that originates in a culture that isn’t ours. We dressed up as J-pop because of that medium’s blatant production-line approach to music as commerce, with little consideration for the individuality of the people it packages. Western music can be blamed for the same thing to a lesser (or just less-obvious) extent—and that’s the association we’re trying to make.
