“One of Benzino’s issues with Eminem is that Eminem acts like he’s a street guy, a hard gangsta, and that he’s not, he’s a fraud,” says Sway Calloway. “In rap, who doesn’t? Everybody’s been gangstered out or else they rap about stories that haven’t always happened. From the beginning, people have made themselves into superheroes in their raps. But, the thing is, Eminem has never tried to say he was a gangsta growing up, just that he grew up hard. The only point Benzino has is that Eminem was accepted in the industry and the world easier for doing the same things that black rappers have done over the years—and Eminem’s had more success doing it. There is validity to that because Eminem reaches new fans who probably grew up like him and look like him a little bit and can relate to him better than they’ll relate to DMX. To those fans, Eminem’s like a rock star, like Nirvana was. They can relate to him and it’s just cool and hip to be down with the guy who’s anti-establishment.”
Benzino is a representative of the problem he wishes to assail, the pressure of greed in an increasingly lucrative industry. Rumors have surrounded his involvement in The Source, from the influence he must wield to have warranted repeated coverage of a solo career of which sales have barely broken the 100,000 mark and of which the greatest sales numbers to date (with his former group, Made Men) top off at about 125,000. In addition, for all of his talk of racial impropriety, Benzino is half white, the son of a white mother and black father. While Benzino’s attack did not damage Eminem’s career, it did alter the public perception of what was once the bastion of hip-hop music criticism. In this way, perhaps, Benzino achieved his goal, managing to damage a white-owned media corporation that profits from hip-hop: The Source, founded by two whites, one of which, David Mays, remains at the helm.
“The Source is part of the same system Benzino is talking about, to be honest with you,” says Calloway. “It’s confusing, but everything they’re saying the system is guilty of, they’ve been guilty of, too. They had Eminem on the cover just as many times as Rolling Stone has to sell issues. And Rolling Stone is pretty clear about the fact that they don’t put too many black artists on their cover. Eminem isn’t lying to himself or his audience about selling more because he’s white. But he’s also saying, ‘Let’s be real, I’m one of the best that’s doing it right now, hands down.’ And he is.”
Race is the newest debate in the ever-evolving identity of hip-hop, and likely will be for some time as the effects of Eminem’s success are felt throughout the industry. Hopefully the discussion will bring to light the industry standards and expectations that limit what hip-hop can be. Eminem is, in this arena, as much of a lightning rod for conflicting views as he is a symbol of cultural trends. His talent, however, transcends the issues and will hopefully leave the most lasting impression on hip-hop, whether it is a public demand for a less materialistic brand of rap or a move toward more complex song-craft and unique confessional storytelling.
“To me,” says author Shelby Steele, “the thing to do is not call Eminem Elvis, it’s to compete. If he sets a new bar, meet it. That’s how music forms evolve. It has not a thing on earth to do with race. Because he is white, it is an invitation to misread the situation and talk about Elvis and the music being ripped off. You can’t put a 1955 pattern on something happening in 2002. Eminem has shown considerable respect for rap as an art form. He’s not taking it, as they did in the fifties, into some bubblegum form. He respects and identifies with it. What more can you ask? There is homophobia in his lyrics but there’s certainly no racism. Is it somehow against the law for whites to practice this? Playing the race card on Eminem will get attention and plenty of ink. People will take it seriously and anguish over it. But playing to race isn’t going to change Eminem’s standing with anyone. You can’t just call him a white boy. You have to be better than he is, you have to have a larger audience, a greater appeal—in short, you have to compete. You have to win Eminem’s audience away from him if you really want to do him damage. And you can’t do that with the race card.”
In an essay titled “State of the Art 2003,” posted on his website in December 2002, Chuck D decried the lack of wordsmanship in mainstream hip-hop, proclaiming that the newest generation of rappers care little for language and wit, the foundations of rap’s greatest lyrics. Chuck blamed the get-rich-quick attitude of rap’s support system (the major record labels) and the artists themselves—in short, the success of capitalism over art.
Many successful rappers other than the Jay-Zs and Nasirs [Nas] have shunned the basic artillery. Today we literally have rappers who simply cannot speak, much less have a limited vocabulary of 50 to 100 words.… Right now some cats have rejected the notion of using wit in words, which in “rap” certainly leads to an oxymoron.… Eminem has gained the throne of hip-hop consciousness, if you can call it that, by default. The hip-hop nation slides into settling for “dumbassification” while the opinion, wit, and words come from a white kid from the suburbs of Detroit. There’s nothing wrong with Eminem being brilliant, the kid is like a rap Roy Jones Jr. It’s just that his black peers have settled for not working as hard on the elements or skills of rap and hip-hop, choosing to dwell instead on dumb shit. This is Elvisification in a different manner.… Here, in rap, the tenants treat the condo like the projects, giving it away in the sloppy process of it all.”
Rap success today, more than ever, is judged by everyone—the artists, labels, media, and fans—in terms of units sold. This attitude has grown beyond the mission of self-improvement, betterment, and the freedom to flaunt that was inherent in early hip-hop; instead, the aesthetic of mainstream hip-hop is a glorified accumulation of goods and the necessary toughness to keep them. Rappers are hardly bashful about the pursuit: Method Man told MTV News in a February 2003 interview that if he did three movies for $5 million each, he’d drop out of music and never be heard from again. His view is entirely understandable from the social context of someone wanting to work hard, earn enough to take care of their family, and then retire comfortably, but it is problematic to the identity and quality of hip-hop music as a black American expression.
A divergent grade of gangsta: Eminem in 2001.
“Hip-hop is so different now,” says André of OutKast, whose first record came out in 1994 when the duo were still in their late teens. “Rap is kind of dead to me because it is the mainstream now. People are still saying ‘We’re keeping it underground. We’re keeping it underground.’ But really, that’s bullshit. Because, shit, once they start putting rap songs in commercials and rap is outselling country music and all this type of shit, it’s not the same anymore. It’s a different type of white kid that listens to it now. It used to be kids listened to it for the same reason they liked punk—it was a rebellious thing your parents didn’t like. To those kids, it was cool to listen to N.W.A say ‘fuck the police.’ That was like your music while you’re skipping school and partying and drinking and shit like that. Rap was something those white kids discovered, it wasn’t just there in front of them. Now, it’s everywhere, it’s not a novelty to anybody.”
If anything, and perhaps fittingly, the materialistic vision of hip-hop at the early part of the new millennium is more an expression of “white” America than the music has ever been. As the first generation of hip-hop entrepreneurs—CEOs such as Puff Daddy, Russell Simmons, Jermaine Dupri, and Damon Dash—take their place as power players within the system of our society, from summering in the Hamptons with New York City’s upper class to establishing a hip-hop political lobby group (the Hip-Hop Action Summit Network), the leaders of the culture are living a life closer to the white American dream of luxury homes, expensive clothes, and upper-crust influence than to the street style that got them there. This current hip-hop aesthetic as it plays out in the music seems to be searching for a middle ground, pulled by roots in a lifestyle that success seems to necessitate leaving behind. Today, the most successful mainstream rappers and businessmen find a way to promote a black image without a true sense of identity politi
cs—the opposite of what defined success for late-eighties groups such as Public Enemy. As he has through the history of hip-hop, Russell Simmons has set a wise, commercially viable example of the new hip-hop identity. Through his many ventures, from the Tony Award–winning Broadway show Def Poetry Jam to the HBO series Def Comedy Jam and from his clothing label, Phat Farm, to his wildly influential record label, Def Jam, Simmons espouses an all-inclusive philosophy. His take reflects the origins of hip-hop, in which races and musical styles mingled freely under the leadership of black DJs and MCs, but he wisely also adopts the attitude of all of America’s youth as hip-hop’s own.
“Kids of all colors, all over the world, instinctively seek to change the world,” Simmons said in his autobiography, Life and Def. “They usually have this desire because they don’t want to buy into the dominant values of the mainstream. Rappers want to change the world to suit their vision and to create a place for themselves in it. So kids can find a way into hip-hop by staying true to their instinct toward rebellion and change.” In his book and in interviews, Simmons places hip-hop into terms that the white mainstream can understand, drawing parallels to the Woodstock generation and the Baby Boomers’ faith in the power of music to change the world. Simmons is accepted because he does not equate hip-hop with black America, he equates it with youth, a stance more true every day. We live in a time when race identity politics, regardless of this country’s social conditions, are simply not popular and, in many ways, are no longer relevant. Hip-hop, a musical form that existed and thrived in spite of the system, even when it includes images as antiauthority as those of N.W.A, Ice-T, and Public Enemy, has become part of the system.
“The most benign version of what’s happened between white and black music in the past fifty years is that white people took the part that applied to them,” says Dave Marsh. “There is, obviously, a much less and equally accurate version of that story. I think Eminem has destroyed that framework and I think it’s going to be a problem for black people and white people now. If you want to see some of the results of it, go listen to that second Nelly album, Nellyville. The vision he’s talking about ain’t got nothing to do with being black. There’s no identity politics whatsoever and there really isn’t anybody who is terribly popular in hip-hop right now that does have that angle going on. Public Enemy [was] a very intelligent version of it, but I don’t even think Chuck D is running the identity side of it anymore. Because it is over.”
In hip-hop, the most successful artists of the last few years, from Nelly to Nas to Jay-Z, have not overtly or exclusively flown the flag of black consciousness that once defined hip-hop identity. Nas comes closest, particularly with the single “I Can,” from God’s Son (2002), an empowerment call to young black fans that includes a verse about the earliest origins of slavery. “The Nas song ‘I Can’ is so sort of classic KRS-One,” Farai Chideya says. “It’s really cute and has a great social message. But it’s been, what, like ten years since a song like that came out? I’m not saying that every song should be that, and I’m not saying that hip-hop can’t still be angry and complicated, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a market bias against songs like that, songs you actually could play for an eight-year-old.”
But Nas is the exception to the norm, and although he’s a far superior lyricist, he’s not as hot of a seller as Nelly, who has sold about thirteen million copies of his two albums. Nelly’s 2002 album, Nellyville, is, as Marsh asserts, an album with values traditionally associated with white America. On the title track, “Nellyville,” the St. Louis rapper envisions a bling-bling version of what sounds like a post–World War II suburb, complete with paperboys doing their rounds in Range Rovers and half a million dollars given to every newborn. It is a rap redefinition of the white American dream: a house, marriage, and a community without crime, poverty, or strife in which to raise children, complete with a sunny sky above. Nelly filters this image through hip-hop aesthetics, but the only reference to the history of black Americans comes in his recasting of reparations from “forty acres and a mule” to “forty acres and a pool.” When Nelly appeared in a 2002 “Got Milk?” print-ad campaign, it was true symbiosis: He is the first black musician to be in such an ad, joining the ranks of everyone from the Backstreet Boys, the Dixie Chicks, Steven Tyler, Alex and Eddie Van Halen, Britney Spears, Tony Bennett, Hanson, Elton John, Billy Ray Cyrus, and other artists deemed appropriate to hawk dairy. Nelly’s take is clearly connecting with fans; his single “Hot in Herre” hit the top of more Billboard charts, from pop to R&B, than any other song in 2002, while his album ranked second for overall sales with 4.8 million, second only to The Eminem Show’s 7.5 million.
Eminem, more than Nelly or any other pop culture artist at the moment, personifies American society’s present racial awareness, one no longer based solely on skin color. This trend is easy to see in music, and representative of the greater change. Today it isn’t unusual to see an Asian MC lead an alternative rock band, as in Linkin Park, or a mixed-race guitar player be one of the best in the business, as is Tom Morello of Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine, or a band where a dazzling range of traits come together, as in P.O.D., a group of dreadlocked rap-rockers, including three Hispanics and one black Born Again Christian. So too are racial “norms” open for reinterpretation. “Today, race is performative,” says Farai Chideya. “You can be a white guy who acts black; you can be a black guy who acts white; you can be a Chinese person who acts Latino. To a great degree, Eminem does come from a place where this kind of black performative identity was not unnatural to him, but it’s also performative in how he chooses to do it and how, as a performer, he directs it to appeal to not just the white crossover audience, but particularly to a black audience. What Eminem demonstrates clearly is that race now is not just about the color of your skin, it’s also about your psychology. It’s about you positioning yourself. It is a mix of conscious and unconsious factors that situate you in a demographic which your skin color might even deny. It’s a fact today and it took hip-hop to make this fact manifest. There have always been people who have had cross-racial identities, not because they are mixed-race, but because of how they grew up. But hip-hop laid it on the table that people were choosing an identity. Because of hip-hop, kids of all races and from different countries buy into what hip-hop says about their lives. These people’s life circumstances help dictate that they are different from what their skin color might say they are.”
America’s move toward this new racial reality has accelerated in the years following hip-hop’s mainstream takeover and Eminem’s ascension to prominence. In researching her book The Color of Our Future just a few years ago, Chideya interviewed teens of all races across the country and encountered a different sensibility. “I met black teens who seemed ‘black,’ classically black, and black teens who seemed ‘white,’ and every cross-hatch. This was in 1997 and one guy I interviewed was a white ‘black’ guy, a ‘wigger.’ At the time everyone was using that term and people were still freaked out that white kids listened to hip-hop if those white kids lived in Iowa or Indiana, and the guy I interviewed insisted that I not call him a ‘wigger.’”
Cross-race musical hybridization, pre-Eminem, was often regarded as a faux-pas.
When the eclectic electric folk singer Beck released Midnite Vultures in 1999 (his quirky tribute to soul, funk, Prince, and R&B), it was taken by some critics as an elitist hipster parody of black culture. Somehow, Beck’s stream-of-consciousness humor, the same that informed the line “Drive-by body pierce!” in “Loser,” the hit that introduced him to the world in 1994, was seen as pointed and judgmental. Some people particularly harped on “Debra,” an R&B ode sung in falsetto, by a guy who would like to “get with” the subject of the song, a girl named Jenny, as well as with Jenny’s sister, Debra. The vocals and the music are as earnest as the lyrics are hilarious, with the narrator asking Jenny to step inside his Hyundai after comparing her to ripe fruit and impressing her with a fresh pack of gum.
“My whole intention with that record was to tap into the kind of energy you see at a hip-hop show or an R&B show,” Beck told me in 2002. “It came out of a love for the music, but people think I’m making fun of it because I’m not afraid of humor. Particularly the song ‘Debra.’ I didn’t want to put it out at first because I knew people would think I was lampooning. ‘Debra’ wasn’t really meant to be funny. If you take the subject matter of one of these contemporary songs, it’s amazing what they get away with. I didn’t want to do a real white, soul, Al Green-influenced thing, because then I’d be in Steve Winwood territory, which is fine, but I wanted to duplicate where people were at in the R&B world. It’s funny because when I’d meet people in R&B and hip-hop, people like Timbaland, they really loved it, they totally got it. The only people that looked at it sideways weren’t involved in that world at all.”
Within this era’s shifting musical and cultural scene, Eminem is riding, and virtually is, the zeitgeist. His music is played on BET, MTV, and rock, rap, and Top 40 radio stations, and his fans range from the age of fifteen to fifty. Hip-hop is the language that erased many of these borders and is the common denominator upon which all racial influences mix freely, whether or not the roots or pathology of hip-hop culture is understood by more casual consumers. A generation of kids who grew up with hip-hop’s flavor in pop culture has come of age, inspiring a deeper degree of hybridization even in traditionally white schools of music, such as heavy metal. Angsty bands such as Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park, whose music has loosely been labeled everything from rap-rock to neu metal, may be predominantly white acts (with some Hispanic and Asian members), but their singers rap their verses and wail their choruses over minor-key melodies while the bands’ DJs (in Linkin Park’s and Limp Bizkit’s cases) scratch out solos. The imagery of the bands is even more cross-racial. Korn spent a good deal of their early career in Adidas track suits, like Run-D.M.C., and were photographed with pit bulls and on low-rider bicycles, two symbols associated with West Coast Hispanic gangs. Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst wears baggy hip-hop gear and a backward baseball hat, which in the past signified a break-dancer who was ready to compete. Korn and Limp Bizkit were the first rock outfits to openly adopt hip-hop posturing in the late nineties, inspiring one writer in the alternative paper The Boston Phoenix to proclaim them “blackface metal.” The writer, Carly Carioli, found Korn’s “racial transgression” to be the expression of youth who choose, in the face of the complicated issues of race in this country, to express themselves in knuckleheaded gestures on par with fart jokes. Carioli might have felt the same about the simultaneous emergence of Kid Rock, a Detroit native who fuses classic rock with a pimp image and an oldschool rap delivery and who has been doing so since 1990.
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