White Rappers and Hip Hop Authencity

          In the Hip Hop industry, there has been a great controversy regarding white rappers and how “authentic” their music is in echoing the trials and triumphs of urban black youth. Hip Hop Music began in predominantly black areas where artists would voice the political and societal concerns of Black people in the United States. Since it’s beginning, Hip Hop music was used as a tool to address racial issues and the use of police brutality on Black men and women. Ultimately, Hip Hop Music rose into the American music industry enabling artists across the country to become well known.  However, due to the fact that most of rappers were Black, Hip Hop Music became “music for black audiences”. Each rapper had a story to tell about his or her experiences in a predominantly Black setting and this drew mass audiences of Black people who shared these experiences. As a result of this sentiment, many white rappers find hardships in the Hip Hop Industry because not all of them connect to Black Audiences that grew up in "the hood”. As Ben Bollig states in,White Rapper/Black Beats:Discovering a Race Problem in the Music of Gabrieal o Pensador, “Rap, the combination of rhythmically delivered rhymes (MC-ing) with variously adapted pre-recorded (DJ-ing) has risen from the Bronx ghetto to become a symbol of Black Protest and economic power…(Bolig,2002).  In this definition, white rappers often times are seen as imitating and making a mockery of Hip Hop because they do not fit into the image a “typical rapper”. For example, one white rapper that has faced hardships throughout his career is Vanilla Ice who claimed to have had the same experiences as Black rappers. The problem that many critiques found with this claim was the fact that Vanilla Ice grew up in a suburb in Texas and never faced the hardships of urban inner city life as a Black person. Vanilla Ice’s lyrics also reflected the world of suburban youth who were mostly white and came from higher economic classes than that of Black fans who came from poor and less economically developed areas (Leechor,.2008).  Mejin Leechor reflects this belief stating, “When the press revealed that he had actually grown up in suburban Texas, critics and rap fans skewered him, destroying his musical career.(Leechor,2008)" The fact that Vanilla Ice did not fit into the criteria of a “rapper” made him vulnerable to criticism. For one thing, it was hard for many Black rappers to see Vanilla Ice on the same equal level because 1.He was white 2.He grew up in the suburbs and 3. He did not know what it is like to live as a Black person in the urban setting.  Leechor continues to state, “He had broken rule the first rule of hip-hop authenticity: stay true to yourself.  White rappers experienced nearly a decade of great difficulty breaking into the field after Vanilla Ice’s deception.  Whiteness and hip-hop authenticity suffered a critical rupture, and Vanilla Ice became the industry scapegoat.” Consequently, as a result of this, white rappers found other hardships in terms of the privileges that they had in the music industry as opposed to Black rappers. In the 2014 Grammy's Macklemore,a white rapper won the award for best rap album of the year beating black artist Kendrick Lamar. This created a huge controversy for Mackelmore due to the claims that his "whiteness and usage of "clean rap” made him acceptable to the music industry rather than that of Black artists like Kendrick Lamar who also raps about the same themes similar to Macklemore.  

Vanilla Ice

                                                                     

Macklemore

White Rapper/Black Beats: Discovering a Race Problem in the Music of Gabriel o Pensador

Ben Bollig

Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2002), pp. 159-178

Published by: University of Texas Press

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1556447

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