White Rapper

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Eminem, a white rapper, released The Marshall Mathers LP in 2000. It has since become the second-best-selling hip hop album of all time.

A white rapper is a rapper who is white. From its inception, hip hop music and culture have carried strong associations with blackness, with anthropologist Jordan Davis describing hip hop as "an exemplary black space." White rappers initially emerged as anomalies within hip hop music and faced poor reception among hip hop's core audience. Over time, as predominantly black hip hop audiences began to accept certain white rappers, the white rapper emerged as an archetype within hip hop. This led to a shift in the racial dynamics of hip hop. Some white rappers began to work to make hip hop, which had once been a black movement, appear racially neutral, while others used the genre to obscure or even celebrate whiteness and its impact.

History

Hip hop culture originated in the Bronx during the 1970s, a period of economic collapse and de facto racial segregation. During this period, New York City lost much of its middle-class, white population to white flight, leaving poor and overwhelmingly black residents to deal with the effects of urban poverty, deindustrialization, and segregation. Bronx residents adapted the urban landscape to fit their cultural needs. Jamaican migrants introduced the sound system, MCing, and DJing to the Bronx, while the walls of abandoned buildings became canvases for street art, and ersatz dance floors made of cardboard allowed for the development of breaking. Hip hop culture soon spread among black populations through New York and across the world. Black audiences embraced the culture and its association with blackness, with hip hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc saying of the community, "we come from one coast and that coast was Africa."

Hanif Abdurraqib described Vanilla Ice (pictured) as "corny enough to be hated but not too corny to sell records."

A decade after the movement's founding, white artists became prominent in the hip hop cultural sphere. Journalist Jeff Weiss describes the Beastie Boys as "the first [white rappers] to shoot to fame," following the success of their 1986 album License to Ill. The Beastie Boys' success prompted a fad of labels promoting white rappers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with artists like Vanilla Ice and "Marky Mark" Wahlberg achieving mainstream visibility. Many within the hip hop culture viewed these artists with skepticism, regarding them as subpar musicians and their success as a form of cultural appropriation of an organic movement by corporate interests. Cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib described the late 1980s and early 1990s as the moment when "aspects of [hip hop] were becoming less feared and easier for white people to digest," because artists like Vanilla Ice, whom Abdurraqib describes as "corny enough to be hated but not too corny to sell records," sold them hip hop music in a palatable way.

At the same time, a moral panic emerged among educated whites concerning black self-expression in hip hop. In 1989, white lawyer Jack Thompson (who has since been disbarred) entreated Florida governor Bob Martinez to enforce a ban against all-black group 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty as They Wanna Be on grounds of obscenity. The same year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation banned radio airplay of NWA's 1988 song "Fuck tha Police," which decries racial profiling and anti-black violence by police. During this period, as hip hop music received more mainstream attention, blackness in hip hop faced stigmatization, while record labels used whiteness to launder hip hop music for a wider audience.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, certain white rappers had found an audience among serious consumers of hip hop. Abdurraqib writes that in the late 1990s, Eminem, a native of majority-black Detroit and protégé of NWA alumnus Dr. Dre "gained a type of credibility," among black listeners "for the ruthlessness and carelessness with which he regarded human life, particularly his own." Eminem's ability to resonate with black audiences, as well as his "controversy, cosigns, and actual ability," allowed him to become a genre-defining figure in hip-hop. His 2000 album The Marshal Mathers LP stands out as the second-best-selling hip hop album of all time. In the early 2000s, Paul Wall, a native of the majority-black Acres Homes neighborhood of Houston became a defining figure of southern hip hop alongside frequent collaborator Chamillionaire. Eminem and Paul wall achieved legitimacy in hip hop in a way that earlier white rappers could not because they operated in black cultural spheres. Earlier white rappers like Mark Wahlberg, who, just five years before launching his rap career had participated in a racist attack wherein he and other white teens "pelted black children with rocks" and yelled "kill the niggers," could not relate to hip hop's core audience. By contrast, Eminem and Paul Wall used their cultural background to communicate effectively with black listeners.

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The emergence of serious white rappers prompted the development of serious white hip hop music listeners. By the 2010s, white rappers could achieve success and recognition by appealing directly to white audiences, without the need for black mentors or collaborators to cement their legitimacy. The "white rapper," once an anomaly, became a hip hop archetype and an identity that some rappers adopted. In 2011, Texas rapper Riff Raff released his debut single "Larry Bird." In the song, Riff Raff compares himself to Larry Bird, a white man who achieved success playing professional basketball, another pursuit associated with blackness. During this period, Riff Raff sported the logo of cable television network BET on his chest as a tattoo, marking himself as a consumer of black culture. Riff Raff later stated that the tattoo stands for "Baller Entertainment Television," offering the explanation that "money ain't racist." Riff Raff has since had the tattoo covered. In 2015, Post Malone continued the theme of self-comparison with basketball players in his breakout single "White Iverson." In 2012, Bones released his first mixtape under the title WhiteRapper. In 2014, rapper Lil Debbie credited her former group White Girl Mob as "pioneers" in hip hop music. Fellow White Girl Mob member V-Nasty generated controversy over her use of the word "nigga," though this did not stop her from releasing the collaborative mixtape BAYTL with Gucci Mane, whom music journalist Jordan Sargent called "one of the most prolific and popular Southern rappers," in 2011. Mainstream success had made whiteness and white people a significant part of hip hop's racial landscape. White rappers could find a place in the hip hop community because of their whiteness, rather than in spite of it.

By the later 2010s and 2020s, white rappers had begun to shift the racial dynamic of hip hop, taking a black movement and transforming it into a race-neutral or even a white one. Promotional art for G-Eazy's 2016 tour used a "sleight of hue" to make it appear that the white G-Eazy had the same skin color as his black openers YG and Yo Gotti. Journalist Jon Caramonica called this "avoidant, devious, disingenuous, rude." In Caramonica's analysis, making G-Eazy's skin appear the same color as YG's and Yo Gotti's buried the glaring implications of two black rappers appearing as supporting acts for a white one in what had once been a black genre. Caramonica described this as a form of "black cultural erasure," a phenomenon wherein cultural mediums that had once empowered black people become (apparently) race-neutral to accommodate white artists. More recently, white rappers began to use hip hop music to assuage white insecurities and even celebrate whiteness. In his 2018 single "Whiteboy," Canadian rapper Tom MacDonald opened with the lyric, "I cannot feel guilty for shit that I didn't do" and insisted that "There's racist white people but we're far from that collectively." Actor Adam Pepper, who appeared in the music video for Whiteboy, reacted with shock at MacDonald's claim that white people face discrimination, stating "As a Black man, with racism and the way police target us, you're like, 'what in the world? How could he say that?" Pepper believed that MacDonald said these things for shock value rather than because he really believed them, but MacDonald would continue to make white-centric hip hop music. In 2022, MacDonald released a similarly-titled single, "Whiteboyz," in collaboration with rapper Adam Calhoun. Calhoun, a vocal supporter of far-right US President Donald Trump, had previously released a song called "Racism" wherein he "us[ed] the n-word with impunity." On "Whiteboyz," MacDonald and Calhoun celebrate white, male identity, boasting "God ain't never made no motherfuckers crazy as the white boys." While just twenty years earlier white rappers existed as an anomaly in a black cultural movement, by the late 2010s and 2020s, concert promoters worked to obscure the racial dynamics at play in hip hop, and white rappers made music for white listeners that assuaged white guilt and celebrated white identity.

Reception

Charlamagne tha God called Post Malone (pictured) "not my cup of mayonnaise."

Given the racial dynamics at play in hip hop, the presence and prominence of white rappers has generated controversy, with some viewing white rappers as anomalies or even as intrusions in hip hop. As early as 1991, Kurt Cobain claimed that "white people shouldn't rap." Former Brand Nubian member Lord Jamar, a longtime critic of Eminem, called the rapper a "guest in the house of hip hop." Eminem later concurred with the statement, asserting "I never said I wasn't a guest." Hip hop blog The Double Cup argued that white rappers often have problems attaining legitimacy in the eyes of hip hop artists and consumers because they tend to "come off as cornier than the state of Iowa," and because many "aren't actually 'rappers,'" asserting that they use underdeveloped and unmusical vocal techniques. Music journalist Alice Hines criticized the relation of Tom MacDonald's work with white supremacist politics, stating that it "offers cover to people with straightforwardly dangerous ideas." Television and radio host Charlamagne tha God described Post Malone as "not my cup of mayonnaise [a condiment associated with whiteness]," and told Post Malone "I think all white people with cornrows look stupid" in response to the rapper's hairstyle.

The white rapper has become a hip hop archetype. Numerous articles, such as "Top White Rappers of 2021," "Top 50 White Rappers," and "A Condensed History of White Rappers" treat white rappers as a subgenre or market niche of rappers overall.

References

This article "White Rapper" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:White Rapper. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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