"And is it authentic native music?"
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What Miles is asking without knowing he's asking it because he's living in 1893 is, "Do you have native Hawaiians in your band or are you a cultural appropriating scum-bag?" Of course he would have been using the term "scum-bag" to mean "a bag used in the refining of sugar" and not in "a condom." Also people almost certainly weren't referring to other people as "scum-bags" in 1893. All of this is to say that this book was written in 2006 so Pynchon was probably hinting at the idea of whiteness appropriating foreign native arts and ideas as their own in the only way an 1893 kid could: being truly passionate about Hawaiian music and wanting to know if Miss McAdoo's band reproduced it authentically. This entire bit about ukuleles and a white woman dancing foreign dances is a continuation of Pynchon's examination of the Chicago World's Fair and how it treated non-white arts and cultures. They were things to be curious about and maybe admire on their own merits, divorced from the context of the culture which created them, because looking too deeply at the culture and the people and how these arts and creations came to the shores of the white men bring up too many questions with nearly only depressing answers.
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