If anything, Eminem downplays his race advantage, out of respect for hip-hop and to maintain his credibility. If he chose to, Eminem could be everywhere. There isn’t a media outlet in the country that would refuse an interview with Eminem, and this has been so since 2000. Eminem is careful about the kinds of media projects he participates in, and most of the magazines and TV shows that feature him do so without his cooperation. The number of corporations willing to pay Eminem millions for product endorsements are even more numerous. Whereas the average fan doesn’t hold it against Jay-Z for doing a Heineken commercial, or Method Man and Redman for hocking deodorant, Eminem would not be judged as kindly as another rapper trying to get paid in full. To his credit and to his credibility, Eminem has done virtually nothing to cash in on his popularity that wasn’t directly tied to the music: Aside from a DVD release of an animated series and two limited-edition action figures, Eminem’s clothing line, Shady, will be the rapper’s first nonartistic merchandising venture beyond T-shirts and hats. Still, the idea of a popular and consistently genuine white rapper does not sit well with many rap fans.
“It almost seems as if the black folks who love Eminem want to love him more than any of the white people who love Eminem,” says Village Voice critic Sasha Frere-Jones. “It’s like some kind of anti-recapturing. It’s a game in which there have been so many moves at this point. There have been white people fucking with hip-hop and black culture before, but I don’t think anyone has ever gotten the one hundred percent stamp of approval. I think that gold stamp has been in the box for fifty years. And he is the first dude to get it. The Beastie Boys got it for a minute, but they took themselves out of the game. Eminem wants to be in hip-hop, right in that tradition. And he got the full-on go-ahead.”
“He’s the great white hope,” Snoop Dogg says. He’s the first one that’s really solid, hardcore, really commited.”
In 2002, when Eminem’s commercial gain and artistic breadth expanded further than that of any rapper in history, his achievements sparked new concern and dialogue in the hip-hop community, including a roundtable organized by The Source magazine for their March 2003 issue. In their online journals, Bay Area radio DJ and hip-hop archivist Davey D (www.daveyd.com) and rap icon Chuck D of Public Enemy (www.publicenemy.com), in very informative columns, praised Eminem’s take on hip-hop but also highlighted, as both have been doing for years, the conditions inside and outside the black hip-hop community that have reduced the art of rapping to a commerce of detrimental imagery. Chuck D pointed out what was true when he wrote “Don’t Believe the Hype” in 1988: The thug imagery of rappers sensationalized by the media and beloved of the sex-and-violence-hungry American public has eroded hip-hop culture by turning a negative image of blacks into profit, and blacks eager to cash in have willingly participated. Davey D, in an entry titled “Is Eminem the New Elvis?,” related that the debate about whites in hip-hop is not new but is more heated now that hip-hop has become a multibillion-dollar industry and a viable career choice for so many minority Americans. He related his experience in the radio industry over the past decade, which was that as white tastes turned to hip-hop and it became more profitable for radio stations, minorities often played the role of puppets of authenticity for the white corporations that were actually in control. With the option to put a white face on hip-hop, Davey D wrote, white advertisers will, and that is the danger. He compared Eminem not to Elvis but to Larry Bird, the one great white basketball player in the NBA throughout the eighties.
“Like Bird, [Eminem] respects the game and has paid his dues. There’s no denying that. Cats in hip-hop know that Eminem was out there getting dirty like everyone else. Like Bird, he’s good. He’s frustratingly good.… Because Larry Bird was this iconic figure that could do no wrong in the media, as a result he became the scorn of a lot of cats in the ’hood while simultaneously garnering throngs of enthusiastic fans—mostly white—who now had someone running up and down the court who they could identify with. Bird was the man you loved to hate but had to respect because there was no denying his skills. Bird maintained his own style of play. If you recall, everyone in the NBA at that time was colorful. They were flashy. They personified the bling bling of their day. Bird was the exact opposite. He wasn’t as colorful, he wasn’t as flashy, but he was always in the winner’s circle.… At the end of the day, whether you like him or not, Larry Bird was someone who you had to give it up to. Eminem is someone you have to give it up to. He plays the game. He plays the game well and will be around for a while. But Eminem being who he is does not change the racial dynamics that are always at work in America. Let’s keep our eye on the prize and really direct our rage at the machine.”
American culture (and society for that matter) on a mass scale is corporate owned, defined, and controlled; a symbiotic interplay between advertising and product, from politicians to Pop Tarts. The influence of race on the public’s acceptance of an artist or art form is subtle, tied up with economics and played as such by those in power, who remain very much behind the scenes. In the music industry, including MTV and BET, radio holds the reins, dictating to a large degree how and if an artist will blow up commercially, by how much they are heard. Exposure to a mass audience who has become accustomed to accepting what they are fed equals success in today’s market. And the scope of what that audience is exposed to in rap has continued to narrow, over the past five years particularly. Record labels take little risk today, promoting or, likely, adapting artists to fit a successful marketing strategy. The same practices occur in other genres, but rap’s meaning is greater than just entertainment, and the power play of white corporations over black artists is that much more significant.
“Eminem is not really the best example of what I would consider the white appropriation of hip-hop,” Chideya says. “I think the issue is so much larger. It’s not the appropriation by an individual, it’s the market choices that get made to appease what is essentially now a majority white audience. I’m much more interested in finding out what black artists are asked to do in the studio and how their labels treat them and how they’re positioned in a market that’s 70 percent white than I am in Eminem, who is white. The market forces that come to bear on black female artists I’m particularly interested in. Missy Elliot is the only one who has gotten away without showing T&A and it’s partly because she doesn’t look like a cover model, but she has to do some kind of music jujitsu to keep her place. That’s the real issue—how do black artists make the music they want to make? Nobody’s told that story from the perspective of somebody who’s been forced to make tough choices. Chuck D talks about it happening, but that’s only because he’s not in the same position he was before.”
The history of hip-hop on the radio is a clear-cut story between perception and profit and a good barometer of how race, rap, and the music industry, have arrived at their present state. In the late eighties and early nineties when hip-hop proved itself a commercially viable format, the industry fell into a racial quandary. Black “urban” stations at the time were formatted as predominantly R&B, reserving hip-hop mix shows for a few hours late at night on the weekends. There were maybe a handful of rap stations in the entire country. While advertisers paid top dollar for spots on Top 40 stations (dubbed “contemporary hits radio”), at urban stations, even those that were first in their regional marketplace, ads cost less.
In the late eighties, the term urban was adopted to distance a station’s image from the rebellious, violent image of rap; and many stations further distanced themselves by opting to draw an older audience, moving to a black adult contemporary format of mostly soul, funk, and R&B. It was a message to advertisers that a station’s listeners were older, affluent black men and women—the target consumer in marketing plans aimed at African Americans. Regardless of these efforts, advertisers were willing to pay more to reach Top 40 listeners, who were mostly white or Asian. When hip-hop truly exploded in the nineties, its multicultural appeal changed the marketplace. A few stations,
such as KMEL in San Francisco, where Davey D was a DJ, abandoned pop for rap, as did New York’s Hot 97, losing their high-energy pop-dance format. These stations discovered that not only did their audience remain, but the station outdrew their local urban competition. Advertisers that were hesitant to hawk their products on urban stations strangely had no issue with a station classified as pop that played rap.
To the hip-hop community, urban stations that were careful with rap in order to still pay the bills looked like conservatives pitted against the spirit of the black community. It indicated a generational divide consistent with hip-hop’s acceptance in America. Urban radio programmers similarly felt that they were being robbed. The efforts they’d made to integrate rap into their stations’ playlists while balancing their image were useless in the face of the pop stations that had coopted their culture.
The transformation of stations was never a high and mighty revolution, nor was it particularly noted or debated outside of the industry. It was, as is most human history, about Darwinism and money. Pop stations saw an opportunity and they took it; the multimedia corporations who determine the images and art in major media channels have done the same with hip-hop. The trend that dictated a change in format from pop to rap radio in the nineties has spread across advertising and media. As the hip-hop generation came of age, more hip-hop-related art, ads, and other media have spread. Call it a revolution, but don’t be disappointed when you don’t see the system come down; hip-hop is a part of the American marketplace because it is meaningful to a large enough sector of the country to be profitable. Corporations of all kinds, like the pop stations that became rap stations, are integrating hip-hop where they can in order to increase their profits.
Artists in this scheme are the face people, the pawns in a larger game. To recognize the fact that Eminem sells hip-hop better to mainstream white audiences is to get at the underlying structure of image-making in America. He graced more magazine covers in 2003 than any other artist, and many of the magazines, like the January 2003 issue of Rolling Stone, were issues in which Eminem was used as consumer bait—he wasn’t even interviewed. Eminem makes corporate advertisers comfortable, and for that reason the black hip-hop community has something to worry about. In America, mainstream media is targeted at the most desirable consumer group: whites, ages eighteen to thirty-four, particularly females. Eminem is authentic, Eminem is good-looking, gifted, popular, and Eminem is white. He is a marketing man’s dream figure.
“When you have people in the mainstream, à la white publications and outlets, caring about this guy, that would never care about the average black rapper, then obviously he’s doing something right,” says writer Soren Baker. “Being white has at least a substantial part to do with that, but it’s not like he’s not talented, he’s immensely talented. The fact that he’s white just makes it all the more compelling. The rules of rap dictate that he shouldn’t be that good. We have come to expect that white rappers aren’t that good. Since he is and he makes good music and he has great production and he presents himself well and his videos are entertaining, he is fully, completely embraced.”
Whether Eminem’s success will launch a tide of white hip-hop artists pushed by major labels—a condition he parodied in the chorus of “The Real Slim Shady”—remains to be seen but isn’t likely. Corporate machinations have played a major part in the development of hip-hop, though the quality control of the audience, to some degree, has kept the product in check, as they have also dictated prevalent aesthetics. Artists signed to major labels in any genre are allowed little room for development. They are rushed to churn out second albums quickly, particularly if they’ve just scored a hit, before their audience moves on, often at the expense of the music. Public taste and profit has dictated that rap artists with lyrics promoting a bling-bling thug lifestyle, real or imagined, from JaRule to Fabolous to Lil’ Kim to Ludacris, sell the most records and earn the most time on MTV and BET (Black Entertainment Television)—which, not coincidentally, are both owned by the same corporation, Viacom. Such corporate relationships allow for more exposure and synergy if an artist makes their cut. For many rappers who see rap as their one shot at a better life, making more money by following a template is a more important motive than promoting the greater integrity of the hip-hop community. At the same time, artists concerned with social issues in the black community (such as the great and unknown female rapper Jean Grae, Mos Def, or Mr. Lif) might have fans but do not get major exposure—even in the black hip-hop media, where, like everywhere else, sex and violence is the big sell.
It isn’t a new situation in hip-hop, but the emergence of a white rapper with undeniable skill and the embrace of the mainstream has brought the debate to a head. Of late, as the American government becomes increasingly right wing, opting for Big Brother security over civil liberties, hip-hop seems to be more of a target, even at the business level, as both the law offices of So So Def Records and Tha Row Records were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into whether these legitimate businesses were once funded in part by drug dealers’ money. In an industry in which far too much media ink has been spilled over rappers’ arrests for everything from speeding tickets to unregistered firearms possession to rape accusations, the hip-hop community’s worry that a white, “safer” version of hip-hop is more attractive to white corporate advertisers, and may dictate future artist signings, development, and promotion, may be thoroughly warranted.
In the article that resulted from The Source’s March 2003 round-table—those assembled included CEOs such as Roc-a-Fella’s Damon Dash and So So Def’s Jermaine Dupri, and artists such as Fabolous, Eve, and Talib Kweli—the conversation ranged from how major-label moneymakers such as Dash give back to the community to how little the younger artists, such as Fabolous, actually know about the system that is paying them, from the materialistic mentality among younger fans to what kind of responsibility the artists and labels have as role models and creators of the culture. Given the nature of the subject matter, pat solutions are impossible, but the conversation has begun.
A finger for the preconceptions: Eminem with Dr. Dre at his first MTV Music Awards on September 9, 1999.
A more visceral, less-informed reaction to Eminem is the racially charged view of The Source co-owner and rapper Ray Benzino, born Ray Scott, who, while he protested Eminem’s embrace by a mainstream media of America that does not afford blacks the same treatment, essentially questioned Eminem’s right as a white man to be a rapper. Benzino, a half-white Boston native, had spent a decade in hip-hop in two groups, the Almighty RSO and Made Men, and as a solo artist, producing and performing with little success despite elaborate marketing campaigns that ranged from expensively outfitting a truck to drive through Boston playing RSO’s album, to Made Men’s monthly three-page advertising spreads in The Source, an endeavor, before it became known that Benzino was secretly a co-owner of the magazine, that would consume most of the promotional budget for a major artist. Benzino befriended The Source cofounder David Mays some time in the midnineties but the details of their business arrangement and friendship were not made public so much as exposed in 2001, when Benzino prepared to launch his solo career and began to be listed in the magazine’s masthead. In 1994, however, after Mays inserted an article praising the Almighty RSO into the magazine without the consent of his editors, his top tier staff quit and his cofounder Jonathan Schecter thereafter sold his interest in the magazine. Benzino’s albums, The Benzino Project and Redemption, are littered with cameos by artists who had enjoyed major Source coverage or did shortly afterward: Pink, Puff Daddy, Scarface, Foxy Brown, Snoop Dogg, Mobb Deep. Benzino himself was granted the December 2001 cover, later declared a “collectors’ cover” in a Source retrospective. In the months leading up to Benzino’s second solo release (excluding a remix album) Benzino made disparaging comments about Eminem and dropped a bootleg single on which he called Eminem “Vanilla Ice 2003.” In an MTV News interview, he maintained that the controversy was not ra
cial, but in subsequent bootleg singles he proved otherwise. He questioned Eminem’s legitimacy, falsely claiming that Eminem portrays a gangsta image in his music that doesn’t jibe with reality. Benzino claimed to be singling out Eminem as the “hood ornament” of the white corporate machine he wished to call attention to. He feels that the machine won’t allow black artists to cover the same lyrical ground as Eminem, and that black artists only get airplay for party jams while white artists and businessmen live off of hip-hop and co-opting the culture.
Eminem responded with the mixtape singles “Nail in the Coffin” and “The Sauce,” which shed light on Benzino’s relationship with The Source and the biased critical praise Benzino has received in their pages. “Put me on your fucking cover just to sell your little sell-out mag. I ain’t mad, I feel bad,” Eminem raps in “The Sauce.” He also criticizes Benzino for “eating off his own son” in the same song, a reference to a group of child rappers called 3 Down that includes Scott’s nine-year-old son, Ray Ray. Eminem then went for the jugular, including Benzino’s own verses on his mixtape, followed by Eminem’s response cuts, allowing, like any battle MC worth their weight, the listener to judge. Benzino responded by sabotaging any legitimacy in his argument with increasingly personal, race-based slurs against Eminem, tagging Eminem “the rap David Duke, the rap Hitler.” Benzino attacked Eminem’s credibility by defining hip-hop as a storytelling tradition, represented by true-life gangsters who come from the harsh streets of the drug-dealing life, something Eminem has never claimed. Benzino’s series of anti-Eminem singles, which, for all of the magazine’s purported objectivity, were posted on The Source’s website while Eminem’s rebuttal tracks were not, translated into only fourteen thousand copies of his album Redemption being sold the first week of its release, despite a cross-promotion that included a free three-month subscription to the magazine. The sales figure was approximately four thousand more copies than Benzino’s last two albums’ first-week average.
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