Strictly For My Honkies

By Crispin Sartwell

Warning: this article quotes people using racial epithets that you may find offensive.

"Y'all look like you never seen a white person before," says the white rapper Eminem at the beginning of his hit song "The Real Slim Shady." That line captures and reverses an experience that many African-Americans have had: the experience of being treated as a "representative of the race." A black man who walks into a department store in the white suburbs, or a black woman who becomes one of the few minority employees at a software firm, knows what Eminem felt like the first time he stepped onto the stage at a black club and started rapping. Nothing seems relevant but race.

The year 2000 will be remembered in pop music history as the year that white rap came of age. Two of the best pop albums of the year so far are Eminem's *The Marshall Mathers LP* and Kid Rock's *History of Rock.*

The former is - and I am serious about this - a work of literature: it is absorbing though extremely disturbing. In it, the most violent and self-destructive recesses of the post-adolescent soul are explored without apology or hesitation, and Eminem's astonishing words are underpinned by producer Dr. Dre's beautifully menacing fragments of melody. Eminem is the first white rapper who can hold his own with great black artists such as Notorious B.I.G. and Snoop Dogg.

Kid Rock's album, on the other hand, is notable not because Kid Rock is a great rapper, much less a literary figure, but because it is a coherent synthesis of many diverse elements of the history of American pop music. Kid Rock's songs bring together heavy metal, southern rock, country music, hip hop, even gospel and blues.

But these albums are as notable for what they show about the state of race in America as for their artistic distinction. Pop music has always been a place where issues of race are worked out publicly. It is a key form of public speech: a scene of persuasion and transformation, especially among young people.

****

One persistent feature of the history of American pop music has been white appropriation of black styles, from the jazz of Benny Goodman to the blues of Eric Clapton to the disco of the Bee Gees. Often this has looked liberating to the white folks involved, and simply exploitative (as well as mediocre) to the black folks.

At least since ragtime, black musical styles have been on the cutting edge of popular music in America and indeed the world. Elvis Presley and even Hank Williams played in styles that owed their distinctiveness to African America. And white audiences have often preferred to get their black music from white people even in cases - as in Pat Boone's covers of Little Richard or Vanilla Ice's raps - in which the white performer was quite obviously inferior. Often, the appropriation of black styles by white performers has pushed black performers into innovation. By the time white folks had thoroughly colonized swing, many of the best black jazz players had gone on to bebop.

The ascendency of white rappers takes up a complicated place in this history, which is itself a complicated combination of exploitation and celebration. Acts such as Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, P.O.D., Korn, and Rage Against the Machine have also incorporated rap into their various styles.

Eventually, this may push black music to the next phase, but white kids have been rapping since the early eighties. In fact one of the first rap hits was "Rapture" by Blondie. But Eminem's work is profoundly different than the mostly pale imitations of black music performed by such artists as Vanilla Ice (who's now playing harcore punk music), Snow, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, or for that matter Pat Boone.

For one thing, Eminem surrounds himself with black people. On *The Marshall Mathers LP* he collaborates with several black rappers, and being produced by Dr. Dre (an original member of NWA, the inventors of gangsta rap) gives him immediate credibility. Eminem is the first white rapper to get much airplay on black stations, and the reason is simply that he's the first, with the possible exception of the Beastie Boys, to really deserve it.

He says "I'm a commodity/ because I'm W-H-I-T-E." Whiteness is something Eminem plays with, jokes about. Black rappers have been playing around with blackness for years; they enact, often with great irony, the racist stereotypes of black people as sex-crazed thugs. But to play with whiteness signals a radical shift in racial tectonics.

****

The basic thought of American racism is this: We (white people) are average, typical human beings: we are the norm. You (black people) are aberrant and defective. You have a race. We are simply human.

As soon as white people become aware that their experience is as governed by a racial identity (whether self-consciously assumed or imposed by others) as black people's, the concept of race begins to break down because the normativity of whiteness dissolves. Eminem, in describing the experience of being white and in a minority, is showing that he knows that whiteness is as much a race as blackness, that it also can be experienced as aberrant. That's not something you will hear in the music of Benny Goodman or Eric Clapton.

When Kid Rock says "I got love for my honkies," he's simply reversing a typical rap pronouncement: "Much love for my niggers (or, homies)." But when Kid Rock does it, he's taking on board a black epithet for white people; he's showing that he understands what it is like to be excluded or marked on the grounds of race. This is not surprising, since both Eminem and Kid Rock started their careers as rappers in Detroit, widely known as Chocolate City. When you get your white self up to rap in Detroit, they're going to laugh in your face at your race.

So both of them worked out ways to play with their whiteness and to deflect the criticism they received because of it. Both of them looked at black audiences and winked and said: isn't it funny that this white boy is up here acting black? Kid Rock's DJ, a raving wigger and the man who helps create the instrumental tracks, calls himself "Uncle Kracker."

****

Kid Rock and Eminem had to fight for the authority to do what they do. In the world of hip hop, credibility is everything. The rappers who get respect are the rappers who can convince audiences that they're "real": the rappers whose material comes from and returns to the streets of black ghettos. Obviously, white folks don't have that kind of credibility, and so Eminem and Kid Rock had to find other ways to be "real."

Eminem is simply a transcendent talent. His credibility emerges from his storytelling and his style. His achievement makes black and white irrelevant, though other people continue to focus on his race and though he plays with it. But Eminem's talent is a one-off; it's not something that could be imitated by other performers

Kid Rock's approach, though, establishes a new style of pop music. For his credibility comes from and returns to the dirt roads of the *white* ghetto: the trailer-park for instance. Kid Rock is proud "white trash" or a proud "hick" the way the pioneering rapper Ice T is a proud "nigger." The seminal album of gangsta rap was NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" (Compton is a largely black area of Los Angeles). But as Kid Rock says "I'm not straight outta Compton; I'm straight out the trailer."

Country music has authorizing procedures similar to those in rap. Artists such as Hank Williams, Dolly Parton, and Loretta Lynn - who emerge from the poor, rural south - have a particular sort of cachet. Kid Rock annexes country in his recent hit song "American Badass," in which he praises George Jones and Hank Williams, Jr., among others. And he says "I like Johnny Cash and Grandmaster Flash." Uncle Kracker's album *Double Wide* is parked between hip hop and country.

Now that's integration. It aligns black folks and white folks, the ghetto and the trailer park, in a kind of aesthetic alliance that has the potential to bring people as well as musical styles together into the pleasures of a richly American music.

_____