White People and Rap

I'm at my computer listening to Eminem's latest CD, "Encore". My head is bobbing, and I'm rocking back and forth in my chair while I type.

Back in 1979, a catchy little song called Rapper's Delight by Sugar Hill Gang hit the Billboard charts. It was the first hip hop song to break through to the pop charts. Little known to the lower middle class white bread friends and family I grew up with, it was a novelty. We had never heard this type of music, and while we would all go to the skating rink and bounce to it, we still thought, "ah, this is just a fad". But little did we know, this would give birth to Run-DMC, the first rap superstars, who opened the door to a whole new breed of a musical genre. Of course hip hop music was prevalent in the black community before Rapper's Delight crossed over to the mainstream, it's just that our isolated little world had not been exposed to it.

As rap grew in popularity, more and more artists were influenced by it, and it spread to many sectors of the mainstream. In my world, there became a divide among a lot of people I hung with, and keeping in mind that I grew up in the deep south, the majority of opinion with the friends I had then was something along the lines of "I hate rap. That shit sucks." Now, while I didn't hate rap, I didn't listen to much of it either. I was a heavy metal head banger, and that genre just didn't fit in what I wanted to listen to back then.

I heard a comedian once say that he is tired of hearing white people saying, "I don't like rap music, I just don't get it or understand it." His response to that was "IT'S NOT FOR YOU". Now while that is kinda funny, there is a lot of truth to it. The majority of early rap was aimed at the lower income black community, and spoke a lot to what it is like to grow up and live in that environment. It wasn't aimed to win over white people, especially those that didn't live in the harder streets. This was the music of the street. The music of hard struggles and the daily grind of dealing with that life. This was not where I came from, nor many of my friends. Of course it wasn't for me, and it was perfectly okay for me to not listen to a lot of it. I couldn't identify with it. Even in the early 90s, when that atrocity known as Vanilla Ice came out with "Ice Ice Baby", he was pretty much viewed as a joke.

Fast forward to 2000. Rap had grown to phenomenal proportions, and was dominating the pop charts. A lot of the culture had creeped into the mainstream. A friend of mine talked me into listening to ... and I mean really listening ...to a couple of new white rappers, Eminem and Kid Rock. These artists had vastly different styles, one sticking to traditional rap beats, the other mixing the rhythm of southern rock with rap lyrics and hip hop beats. The more I listened to these artists, the more I started appreciating a lot of other rap artists.

And after doing a lot of thinking about why it took a couple of white guys to get me to listen to a wider range of this genre, the more I realized it's because a lot of their lyrics don't just talk about growing up black, but growing up "po' white trash". This, I CAN identify with. This is something I know something about. While I did not grow up in poverty, I certainly didn't grow up rich, either. A lot of my extended family did grow up very poor. A lot of them are still there. A lot of the friends I grew up with were the same. My dad owned a couple of small trailer parks, and while having to help out doing work on those, all of those tenants were poor. To the point they could not afford a monthly rent payment, and paid weekly. And dad knew he had better be there to collect rent on Friday evening, because if he missed them, that money would be gone by Sunday morning.

There are a lot of critics who can't stand Eminem and Kid Rock. They think they are frauds and are somehow stealing black music, capitalizing on it purely for financial gain, or whatever. Well, all I can say is I do not believe either of these artists are frauds. And if they can get a white bread man like me to change my attitude about rap music, opening me up to more diverse realms of culture, then I think they deserve every penny they earn. Stealing black music? Nope, they are bringing a larger audience to accept and embrace it . On Em's last CD, he sampled Aerosmith in one of his songs. On this one, he samples Heart's "Crazy On You". Now that is bridging a divide. Bravo.

~gone