matt,

I agree, aesthetics is a different issue. I see what you mean. I definitely have my preferences...certain things make me cringe, or whatever. I wonder however if, in many cases, that cringing...that feeling that it is aesthetically bad...is not related to my/our sense of the other issue: the politics of it all.

I can think of times when accents seem inappropriate, and other times when they are entirely necessary. I think lots of times we come at this topic (i.e. the topic of what accent should you sing in, discussed periodically) with certain specific examples in mind, and form our opinions based on those. (Being general with "we" here!)

But then we find other example where the ideas don't hold.

The contemporary Jamaican situation is an interesting case.

Another interesting thing about sound clash culture (sorry, taking this further off topic!) is that it is a culture/audience that vehemently and actively -- e.g. in its discourse -- opposes what they call "bias", i.e. any sort of prejudice against performers. Audiences, who view themselves as being invested with the ultimate right to judge the quality of a performance, pride themselves in being fair and not seeing color, creed, etc. So the "community" actively squashes anyone who might say 'hey, this guy is not Jamaican so what does he know? he must be no good." I think this is especially interesting because its different than what goes on with music in a lot of countries, where people fight over who has the authentic "right" to perform some music. Not surprisingly -- and something that has also really struck me about Jamaican music and which may be one reason I like it -- there is very little tension about the issue of "tradition" there. People generally are not fighting over ideas of what constitutes "traditional."
In a lot of ways, its an example that invalidates many people's assumptions about folk and traditional music when they are speaking with, say, English songs in mind.