Hardly.

Check out this article. Its an oldie, but goldie. A great piece of music
journalism (from the book *Bomb the Suburbs*).


"We Use Words Like Mackadocious"
by William Upski Wimsatt


One Saturday last summer, Josh and Eric, college students from Birchhead,
Georgia put on some Cross Colours and old school Adidas to wear to a
neighborhood which Josh described as "kind of scary...almost like a ghetto."
The neighborhood was downtown Atlanta. Jaws stiffened, hats backward, they
hit the city hoping - for what they weren't quite sure - to fit in, to earn
respect, to participate in a lifestyle they had admired for years on TV.
Unsure what to do with themselves they shopped and ate lunch. The didn't
talk to anyone; they barely even talked to each other. "It felt like the
black people were laughing at us," they said later.

Sabrina Williams, 20, of Miami Beach, Florida would have liked to talk to
them. "When I see whites doing that, I quiz them," says Sabrina, also a
college student when she's not working or trying to keep her mom off crack.
"When they don those clothes, to me it's like they're donning a costume,
just like if they was to smear black paint on they face. They're degrading
my culture. They're saying anyone can do this.

"They don't understand the swagger, the way we walk, the way we talk. It
comes from when you don't have self-esteem, okay, you try to mask it. You
say, 'Hey I might not be smart but I'm cool.' All you've got is your
coolness. Being cool isn't something you do. It's something you feel. Here
come all these little white people who never had to live with that shit."

Like it or not, whites seem to be buying rap in increasing numbers. Nameless
Noodlebrains of The Industry estimate that when a rap record goes gold,
whites constitute at least half of the sales.

This has advanced rap's clout, capital, and potential to transform society.
But the white audience doesn't just consume rap, it shapes rap also. Rappers
and record labels aren't stupid. They know who's listening and the music
gets tailored to the audience.

Increasingly, rappers address their white audience, either directly, by
accommodating our perceived tastes, targeting us for education/insult, or
indirectly, by shunning the white audience, retreating into blacker, realer,
more hardcore stances - all the more titillating for their inaccessibility.

With rappers defining themselves in relation to the white audience, the
biggest topic in rap right now seems to be rap itself. To understand where
hip-hop is going, then, we must understand this white audience. Hitchhiking
America this summer, I met dozens of these young peckerwoods and here's what
I found.

The White rap audience is as diverse as the music itself: from the
trench-coat hood outside a liquor store in Montgomery who I almost fought
because he "dint trust no white repotuh" - to Michael, an effiminate wimp
who shrieks "Sang it sistaaa Soujahhh!" as he traces the cul-de-sacs of
suburban St. Louis in his parent's car with the windows rolled up "so we
don't get bothered by ignorant people."

Then you have special interest groups. Metal-heads dig the hard beats.
Parents like the R&B, up-tempo stuff. Ideologues buy the rappers who confirm
their political world view. Teens get off on the coolness and the sex.
Intellectuals appreciate the poetry. Musicians go for Gang Starr - and
likewise for every conceivable taste. When they say they like rap, they
usually have in mind a certain kind of rap, one that spits back what they
already believe, or lends an escape from their little lives. The Hammer-Kris
Kross audience is so filtered, they hardly identify themselves with rap at
all.

Most are more normal. They discovered rap within the last four years. They
like the bass. They like the attitude. They hate Vanilla Ice. They think
it's unfair that they are called Vanilla Ice. They want to experience
blackness, dramatic and direct (more so than fans of jazz and reggae)- but
not too direct, thank you very much. Associating themselves with rap send
the desired message, whether it's "I want some black dick," "I'm not
racist," or simply "I'm cooler than the rest of you white motherfuckers!"

His first year at college, Martay the Hip-hop Wiz, an extremely nice and
otherwise thoughtful Atlanta rapper who always had black friends in high
school, sat at the black table in the cafeteria every day for three months.
"I would sit there writing rhymes and listening to tapes hoping to make some
friends. I would even put the tapes on the table for them to see what I was
listening to. But no one ever talked to me."

They were supposed to talk to him.

Sporting their rap gear and attitude serves to disguise white kids' often
bland, underdeveloped personalities. Unlike the rappers they admire, many
are shy and inarticulate.

"It seems to me that the people with these characteristics would be
naturally drawn to music that is made especially braggadocious just for
them,: notes critic Tom Frank, who points to parallel behavior in punk rock
fans who buy rebellious images in the form of consumer goods. "That's why so
many ads talk about 'breaking the rules'."

If you ask them a question, they act like they're being tested. If someone
accuses them of "acting black," they have a speech prepared. They mete out
calculated, color-blind answers, and brag on how much struggle they've gone
through - however little that is.

Even in Sheridan, Wyoming, the white rap kids("wiggers") wear their X shirts
and blast "Mistadobalina" or "Soul by the Pound" on the way to the strip
mall, obvious to the meaning, oblivious to the irony.

If you think nobody's that dumb, meet Brian and Laramie, 16-year-old, orange
and green outfit matching, blond boys from Louisville, shoppers in a rap
section of a record store.

"Rap is the style in our school," they take turns explaining (I swear I
didn't make this up).

"When I pump it, it makes me feel like everybody can hear me. At school, it
makes you more popular."

"I like the way the voice sounds. It gets you pumped up, gets you in a good
mood."

"It's out favorite kind of music...We buy the clothes we see in videos...We
use words like 'mackadocious'." Laramie grins.

"We have a lot of pro-black clothes," Brian adds more seriously.

Their favorite groups are Public Enemy, X-Clan, and Cypress Hill. "We like
those groups because they have meaning. They're pro-black. They're fighting
back against racism."

Do you ever think the rappers might be talking about you?

"It doesn't bother me, because it's not us who they're talking about. We
think they're talking about someone else, about bigots, white politicians."

Brian and Laramie attend a fifty-fifty public school, but haven't been to a
rap concert because "at concerts they beat up white people."

How do you know that?

"We just know...We've heard."

What if rap fades out and something else comes in?

"We'll probably stop listening to it," they reply in unison.

And because rap has gone mainstream, fans who consider themselves hardcore
(everyone this side of Heavy D) have to prove to everyone, including
themselves, just how down they are with hip-hop. They dis the Beastie Boys,
then Shan, LL, Kane, all the way up to Public Enemy ("They fell off after
the second album...got too established") and Das EFX ("Fuck that happy
shit").

At the extreme they act like they helped invent the shit. "That's our music
they tryna do out in California," says a wiggette who claims she's from
Queensbridge. Yet even lifetime rap fans (excluding those who are
ideological bitches for every supposed black cause) usually discount a
crucial reason rap was invented: white America's economic and psychological
terrorism against black people - reduced in the white mind to "prejudice"
and "stereotyping," concepts more within our cultural experience.

Chris, 21, of Denver, Colorado lives in a pick-up truck and has been dancing
to hip-hop "since Mantronix first came out." Peep his wisdom: "I think
everyone should just be equal, but the blacks are trying to be better than
everyone else. They just don't have it bad in this country. They just say
gimme gimme gimme."

Chris isn't unusual. many white rap fans feel this way.

Part of it is age. Frank, 23, of Queens likes rap, but he's not into it like
his 19-and-20-year-old friends. "My generation grew up with Zeppelin, the
next generation got into it through breakdancing."

Rap's greatest impact is on the youngest listeners. 'I like the ghetto
music. it's real tough in East LA," says Andrew, 11, a wide-eyed blond boy
from posh North Naples, Florida where it is illegal to bounce basketballs
because of the noise. "It shows white people's lives aren't as tough as
theirs. Almost every song someone gets killed. Like the Geto Boys. He
started out in a poor neighborhood." Andrew says that the older kids in his
school don't like rap but the fifth, sixth, and seventh graders don't listen
to anything else.

Sabrina's Advice: "If you want to listen to rap, cool, but investigate it.
Go to a ghetto. We've very open people, not like whites."

"I want them to be offended by rap music," says Sabrina. "Because I'm
offended by them." But instead of taking offense at anti-white lyrics, many
try to distance themselves from the target. In other words, they strive to
be down.

Detroit suburbanite Jamie, 19, is a clerk at a record store. "I can relate
to city life," he says. "Some of my friends were into drugs and fights. I
mean..." he started to say, but his sentence trailed off. A black customer
had entered the store. "W'sup man." Jamie greets him. For Alex, 18, the
paradox goes further. After hoisting some Nikes and a machete during the LA
riots, he hailed a taxicab back home to Pasadena.

Hopefully more and more white kids are gonna start imitating gangsters. Then
it'll get played out and black and Hispanic kids will stop shooting each
other. ("Get that gun away from me you sell-out house nigga! Go talk to a
white girl.")

When Holly Poopster (whatever her name is. Somethin' like that) from the
Chicago suburb of Evanston attended her first hip-hop party a year ago, she
and her friend told me that they didn't feel accepted at the party because
they were white. "We come from a very, very integrated community," she told
me (Evanston is seventy-one percent white), as if to say, "It's not our
fault they don't like us."

It has been a big year for Polly Shmooster! But don't call her Golly
anymore. Her name is "Sista PA," and though she can't quite dance yet, she
has befriended a bunch of dredlock b-boys, and feels welcome at parties. She
writes passionately about breakdancing and stopping violence for Dry-Paper,
a Chicago rap publication.

The Sista even uses words like "phunkyphatphresh" and plays black-than-thou
with another white writer, me, saying that I'm not hardcore. (Thought I'd
return the favor, Hopsy. Next time you play that shit we're gonna battle.)
Topsy has learned what all of us know, that most blacks will accept anyone
who makes the slightest effort not to be a typical white asshole - or maybe
Popsy's still back in the "I must be special" stage.

Wanting to be down but not wanting to sacrifice for it - the way blacks have
to sacrifice to be down with us - that's thr age-old story of whites in
black culture (let alone every other culture on the planet). We fall in love
with black culture and the deeper we get, the more we begin to hear with
black ears, move with black limbs, see with black eyes. Over time and (what
we imagine is much) tribulation, our striving grows less transparent, less
offensive, harder to laugh at. Then we get jobs as documenters, marketers,
and even creators of something that used to be black music.

One day the rap audience may be as white as tables in a jazz club, and rap
will become just another platform for every white ethnic group - not only
the Irish - to express their suddenly funky selves. In the meantime, every
Josh, Eric, Martay, Brian, Laramie, Chris, Frank, Andrew Jamie, Alex, Sista
PA, and Upski of the white race plunges deeper into a debt that we have no
intention of trying to repay.

Of course there are many ways to view whites' role in hip-hop, not all of
them bad, and yes, we are individuals. But let me offer this advice to black
artists: Next time y'all invent something, you had better find a way to
control it financially, because we're going to want that shit. And since's
it's the 90's, you won't even get to hear us say "Thanks Niggers."

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