White Men Can't Rap

You think of my name now whenever you say, "Hi"
Became a commodity because I'm W-H-I-
-T-E, cuz MTV was so friendly to me
-Eminem

White rappers I can think of off the top of my head at this writing: Eminem, Kid Rock, Beastie Boys, Everlast/House of Pain, Fred Durst, Bubba Sparxxx, Zack de la Rocha, 3rd Bass, Crazy Town and a few other nu-metal acts that abandoned hip-hop as soon as Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit stopped selling out stadiums.

Hip-Hop is a uniquely black genre, straight up. R&B, Rock & Roll, Jazz and the Blues have all been co-opted by white artists but hip-hop has always stood its ground. To be accepted into the hip-hop community one has to prove themselves either through the clarity of time or on the lyrical battlefield that exists to keep the genre vibrant.

To be fair hip-hop has always been a very multi-cultural phenomenon since its start in the Bronx in the late 70’s. Things simply can’t be born in New York and not be worldly. But the artists have been predominantly black with latinos and whites filtering in, Asians seemingly not existing.

A couple other white rappers I forgot: Vanilla Ice, The Streets.

White rap starts lets say with Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys. Def Jam, the late 80s and Rick Rubin has teamed up with Russell Simmons to help produce some of the most important early documents of early hip-hop; artists like LL Cool J, Run DMC and Public Enemy trade hip-hop’s Disco roots for the hard edged rock guitars favoured by their long-haired, Jewish producer extraordinaire. One of the best things that Rick Rubin produced was the Beasties debut Licensed to Ill. Not that it’s the most aesthetically appealing animal but its an important milestone for hip-hop, its biggest crossover into the white markets, Licensed might’ve been seen as a potential coup on Rap by some with its fratboyesque mentality (something the Beasties would later renounce). They renounced that early sound and after three years they finally followed up the most successful rap album up to that point with a flop that eventually was given its dues as one of the greatest documents of the hip-hop spirit and a damn near perfect album. The fact that it took so long to follow up is situational but its also common for successful white rappers, while most hip-hop artists will follow up albums within at least two years and generally at an annual basis when they are at their peaks (in the last five years there have been at least 9 Ghostface Killah or Wu-related albums that feature him heavily). The amount of time between Beasties albums in general points to the trio’s desire to constantly evolve their sound and although they’ve experienced varying degrees of success they will never be as big as they were when they were dumbing it down and turning the amps up to 11.

Vanilla Ice is known now as a one-hit wonder and generally dismissed as a white guy cashing in. That is simply not true, Vanilla Ice was a major voice in the Miami Bass movement. Chuck D and the Roots have publicly shouted him out and the money that Suge Knight extorted from him helped fund Death Row records which housed Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and 2pac. Contrary to popular belief, Knight never dangled Ice out of a window and in spite of Knight, Ice was still able to keep his financial gains in check and now lives very richly in his mansion’s mansion with his pet kangaroo and beautiful family and more beautiful car collection.

3rd Bass is a hip-hop cred late 80’s duo, Bubba Sparxxx and Paul Wall are hip-hop cred from the 2000’s. By hip-hop cred I mean that these guys existed in the culture without their race really playing a big part, Eminem is also hip-hop cred but I’ll get to him later.

Rap-metal was a more comfortable medium for white people to enter rap. Some bands flirted with it: Aerosmith/Run DMC, Anthrax, Faith No More, Taproot, Papa Roach, Slipknot &c; but there were some that truly loved hip-hop and stuck with it. Probably the most revered of these bands would be Rage Against the Machine, they mixed MCing with singing and they had those Tom Morello guitars that sounded like turntables which nobody has attempted to imitate on a big level. Their first three albums are some of the best of the 90’s. Deciding whether these guys count as white rap is about as tricky as rocking a rhyme though, because Morello was black and de la Rocha half chicano and half whitey.

If there was anybody that did rap-metal better it was Kid Rock on Devil Without a Cause. Kid Rock got his start on a major label in the late-80’s with a nasty Kid-n-Play style haircut and an opening slot for Ice Cube and Too $hort Things were optimistic as the start but alas the world was not ready and Rock lost his contract and had to hone his skill over the 90’s releasing music independently (check out the History of Rock for excellent highlights of this era). Finally in 1998 the world was ready, in fact they were really ready, Devil Without a Cause sold 11 million copies beating Eminem’s Slim Shady LP and Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other (both released about a year after Devil) by a good 4 million albums.

I think Kid rock was so successful for the same reason that Prince was with Purple Rain in the 80's, he had managed to hone in on a bunch of popular styles like old-school hip-hop, southern & country rock and, of course, heavy metal which was rearing its ugly head again for the first time in a while. His songs were big, creative and trailblazingly original. Devil certainly was a major reason why every metal band that came out around the turn of the millennium claimed Public Enemy and NWA as major influences but the flurry of activity by this new-crop of rap-metal artists (brought on by Korn's and Limp Bizkit’s success too) drained the subgenre of its flavor. With Devil and the stopgap History of Rock album that followed it, I feel very comfortable using the adjective genius. But when Rock finally properly followed up Devil with Cocky about five years later the genre had deflated and Kid Rock’s rhyming skills went down the tubes with pretty much everything else rap-metal minus Linkin Park, who nevertheless cut back on the rapping and DJing that was integral to their early sound. Incubus retained their DJ and so did Slipknot but neither band was really that invested in the rap-metal sound. Luckily Kid Rock found success with his Sheryl Crow duet Picture and was able to reinvent himself as a partying Bob Seger who occasionally rocked the microphone. One last point and then I’ll shut up on Kid Rock: All Summer Long is a hip-hop song that "samples" some majorly type-whitey songs.

Linkin Park might not warrant discussion in this essay as the group’s hip-hop element, MC Mike Shinoda and DJ Mr. Hahn were Asian. Singer Chester Bennington’s vocal style signified the direction heavy rock would take as Kid Rock and Fred Durst’s vocals had done before him, but this time the singers would give up on the whole rapping thing.

Limp Bizkit probably don’t have the hip-hop cred that Fred Durst and DJ Lethal would have hoped for but I’ll always stick up for these “Flo Rida’s” just as I will for Vanilla Ice. There first three albums have dumb moments and may seem absolutely garish to the ears of today's indie-aesthetes but it’s good metal and it’s rap-metal that actually follows the traditions of hip-hop just as Kid Rock’s and later Linkin Park’s music did and since they got their major label start in ’97 they actually were the first true rap-metal act in the genre’s biggest wave (Korn, since they never actually rapped themselves don’t fit into this category although they were perhaps the most influential group in metal at the turn of the millennium and RATM came before that wave).

Rap-metal is a comfortable place for white MC’s to exist if they are good and creative but in the actual rap world things are much trickier. Eminem is proof of this, just watch 8 Mile if you haven’t already to understand why. Eminem is easily the most important white rapper to exist so far and his first three albums are masterworks that deserve to stand next to those of Biggie Smalls, 2pac, A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube &c. What Eminem had and a lot of other white MCs didn’t was the will and the ability to release his music consistently and thus was able to keep himself in the public eye, releasing 4 albums in 5 years. As we all know pills took their toll on Eminem and he stepped out of the spotlight only to come back softer and lyrically weaker but whether he makes a great album again doesn’t really matter. Eminem proved that a white person can become a hip-hop artist and not rely on rock music (although his controversial antics followed a long tradition in rock & roll called shock rock which started somewhere between Elvis and Little Richard or maybe with Screamin' Jay Hawkin's and worked its way through artists like Alice Cooper, KISS & Marilyn Manson). More importantly that initial run of albums was complimented by Interscope Records, Eminem’s personal label that housed D12, 50 Cent and Obie Trice as well as his “Purple Rain” 8 Mile and the accompanying soundtrack, in terms of hip-hop Eminem proved everything he needed to within a few years. He also compared himself to Elvis a lot, which worked in the sense that he was invading a black genre but not accurate because he never truly turned the tide like Elvis did.

The Streets, deserve a mention to. The main guy, Mike Skinner, is very much white but he's British white and thus is a part of a very different musical culture that has seemingly little to do with anything on this list. Still as far as hip-hop goes it's very interesting stuff, Skinner's rhymes never quite sound like they're gonna make it but they always inevitably do. Their second album is a full-blown hip-hopera that tells the story of a very bad week for Mike Skinner (in)complete with an alternate ending.

Finally I gotta shout out the very weird Faith No More. As one of the great non-grunge alternative acts of the late 80's/early 90's they pushed rock's boundaries and made Axl Rose very upset when he thought that they thought that he wasn't cool. Their big contribution to white rap was Epic, a song immortalized as probably the easiest track on Rock Band to beat on the expert vocals setting. Their use of rapped lyrics was emphasized by their fantabulous rhythm section and although singer Mike Patton would rarely MC his band frequently DJ'd.

I always like looking back at the history of white rap and rap-metal. It’s lines are very traceable as there have only been a handful of souls brave enough to attempt it. I’ll also say that at the turn of the millennium when a lot of metal bands were trying to incorporate rap they were actually fusing two very hardcore genres and coming out with something that was popular but that also stood in direct contrast to the heavily processed and corporate sounds of Britney Spears, N*Sync, Celine Dion, Shania Twain...ad nauseum. I’ll finish this (sorta) with a shout out to some great white/non-black voices in hip-hop: Cypress Hill, Rage Against the Machine, Paul Wall, Eminem, House of Pain, Limp Bizkit, Faith No More, Anthrax (but only for getting white people interested in rap, their rap-metal is pure shite), Lil Rob, The Roots’ new/white bass player, Eminem, Crazy Town, Vanilla Ice, 3rd Bass, Papa Roach, Linkin Park and of course my favourite still Kid Rock.

As a side note the word nigger/nigga appears three times in white rap as far as I know. First on a demo cut but never released officially by Eminem. Marshall Mathers used the slur out of anger due to an embarrassing high school break up with his black girlfriend (the break up itself allegedly due to Mathers’ race). The song was leaked and Eminem publicly apologized for his use of the word. Kid Rock rocked it on the autobiographical Devil closer, Black Chick, White Guy. It never sparked controversy possibly due to Rock’s audience or to the song’s emotional honesty (about his relationship to his black babymama). Finally I most recently heard it on Crazy Town’s The Gift of Game. This time we get the more colloquial form “nigga” but that doesn’t take away the bad taste of it. Of course this is coming from a guy who probably says nigga/nigger probably way too much. For another “tasteful” use of the n-word check out Randy Newman’s subversive and sarcastic “Rednecks.”