Macklemore admits he has a certain advantage
in the hip hop world due to the color of his skin. It can be argued that white
rappers (or really any non-African American rappers) that achieve mainstream
success are advancing the scope of the genre, but are somewhat diluting the
content in the process because they are spreading messages that weren’t
necessarily the goal when it started. It is an interesting dilemma because he
is rapping his own stories, but the medium comes from a history that he doesn’t
have. In his 2009 song “White Privilege”, that I have linked below, he rhymes “Hip hop started off in a block that I've never been to/To counter act a
struggle that I've never even been through…But hip hop is not just memorizing
words/ It's rooted in authenticity something you literally can't learn/ I said
I'm gonna be me so please be who you are/ But as I'm blessed with the
privilege, they're still left with the scars.”
Eminem seems to
acknowledge and comment on this in his 2002 song called “White America”. He
notes, “Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like
yourself if they were brown, Shady lose, Shady/ Sits on the shelf, but Shady's
cute, Shady knew, Shady's dimple's would help, make ladies swoon/ Baby, {ooh
baby}, look at my sales, let's do the math, if I was black, I would've sold
half, I / Ain't have to graduate from Lincoln high school to know that.”
For
some reason, parents seem to think the fact that these men have white skin
makes it more alright for their kids to listen and connect with their words
even though they may be just as (or more) controversial and profane as their
African-American colleagues. Looking back on my own childhood, I remember
walking around listening to Eminem’s records. I was a ten-year-old, suburban
white girl, and I had absolutely no context for what he was singing, but I knew
all the words to these songs that somehow spoke to me in an unexplainable way.
I wasn’t listening to Tupac, Dr. Dre, or even the Fresh Prince. I didn’t have
exposure to them, and I doubt my mom would have encouraged or allowed me to
listen to their records.
Now,
the white people privileged kids that grew up on Eminem are buying concert
tickets, and who’s shows are they going to? The artists who have somewhat of a
shared history with them and who’s rhymes they can relate to. According to
Macklemore, “Now I don't rap about guns so they label me
conscious/ But I don't rap about guns cause I wasn't forced into the projects/
See I was put in the position where I could chose my options/ Blessed with the
privilege that my parent's could send me to college/ Now who's going to shows
the kids on the block starving/ Or the white people with dough that can relate
to my content?/ Marketed the music now adapted to the lifestyle/ What happened
to jazz and rock and roll is happening right now.”
Macklemore’s “White Privilege”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp_lW7yYgiM
Eminem’s “White America”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZIzD0ZfTFg
1 comment:
This is an interesting dilemma you bring up that I have been puzzled by before. Last year I studied abroad in Australia, where I stayed with a host family in Lismore, New South Wales. It just so happens that Iggy Azalea, the rapper who has recently risen to fame was also from this town. She left when she was sixteen and moved to Miami to pursue music, and definitely experience hard times, which she raps about in her music.
However, it seems interesting to me that this girl from halfway around the world, having little perspective of Black culture, was able to achieve such success using the frame of rap. My host family and I talked about her success, and how she was successfully able to mine African American culture to become a star. Through globalization and the Internet, rap culture is consumed worldwide. Even growing up so far away, Iggy was strongly influenced by this culture and deemed herself a part of it. Upon leaving Australia she claimed “I was drawn to America because I felt like an outsider in my own country, I was in love with hip hop, and American is the birthplace of that, so I figured the closer I was to the music the happier I’d be. I was right.” Nevertheless, it is hard to say if she really has the right to market herself as a hip-hop artist. Hip-hop is consumable by the masses and a widespread resource, which makes it difficult to monitor how it gets fragmented and manipulated.
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