I was watching Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai last night. The scene where the mafia underboss is dancing around to Public Enemy got me to thinkin': what is it about hip-hop that attracts skinny, middle class white boys?
I’ve been listening a lot to the old Ricky Gervais podcasts over the past couple of months. Usually when I come back from work I “enjoy” mindlessly vegetating in front of my laptop while listening to an episode I’ve already heard four or five times because I’m too tired to think about anything else. In fact, when I’m not listening to Ricky Gervais, I’m usually listening to an album I’ve heard 15 times before, so I guess listening to the podcasts is actually slightly fresher than that. Thanks to a lack of money and my job and daily two-hour commute, my finger is so far from the pulse of recent music that I feel like weeping.
I digress.
I’ve been listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast and it occurred to me that Stephen Merchant’s “Hip Hop Hooray” feature (where he is allowed to play a single hip-hop song, called “the worst feature on British radio” by a visiting Jonathan Ross) entirely exemplifies the people I know who like hip-hop, including myself; they are usually tall, underweight, incredibly white and more often than not suffering from bitterness at the world having been niggled by minor bullying throughout their life, manifesting itself in a heightened and rather dry sense of humour, laced with an underlying misanthropy.
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| Steve Merchant - straight up gangsta |
I can think of several examples of this among my own very limited circle of friends (although admittedly it may simply be the case that I stick with people like myself); while there are clearly going to be a number of exceptions (people I know who are skinny and white but don’t like hip-hop, or people who aren’t and do) there does appear to be a clear pattern there. Furthermore, there are certain absolutes; the hip-hop fans I know are exclusively male and they do seem to be angry about something (although who isn’t?).
So where is the appeal? Why do angry anaemic whiteys listen to so much angry black music? In a way it seems as if, generally speaking (as always), our generation of “alternative” and explicitly angry young people are either deeply entrenched in metal or emo music, both visually and musically, or they dig hip-hop (sometimes, rarely, they are into both). Is it simply the case that the angriest music that can be found that isn’t guitar and wearing-lots-of-black based is hip-hop, regardless of how irrelevant or culturally misplaced this might seem to an outsider? Just what do experiences of drug dealing, white oppression, black ghettoisation and exploitation etc. have to do with a relatively well-off, over-educated, ginger Scottish kid?
Punk was the last great explosion of white anger in the UK. Since then, what have we really had? America has experienced hardcore punk, grunge, riot grrrl, emo, and a much larger share of decent metal bands (I’m think Slayer, mostly), and of course the huge majority of hip-hop, angry or otherwise. Scandinavia and Europe have had the rest of the decent metal. What have we had, objectively speaking? Post punk was fairly angry but too introspective and experimental to be really considered so. Since that we’ve experienced nothing that could really be considered a definitive movement of angry young people, other than throw backs to punk, fairly boring metal bands (Napalm Death being one example to the contrary) or a bastardisation of foreign music scenes, and the yoof have had to look abroad for inspiration. It starts to become less surprising then that people turn to a genre that seems culturally poles apart from our own experience (apart from perhaps in the largely black youth of the largest British cities, London and Birmingham); an irony which is lost on many listeners, and occasionally lost on even the more aware of us.
Does this really matter? Well, I often think about meeting GZA or Chuck D in the street (it’s bound to happen sooner or later) and trying to explain to them why I like their music and why it speaks to me. Would they even want me as a fan? If I tried to explain to them that the irony wasn’t lost on me, wouldn’t this just seem like an insult, a kind of hipster cop out pose, that makes it sound like I enjoy their music as part of an elaborate cultural juxtaposition based joke? Other than that, what do I have? I enjoy it because it’s anti-authoritarian, because it speaks about struggling under oppression; but their idea of oppression and my own are so far apart that the contrast is laughable. Perhaps a combination of the two is the real explanation. Despite the seeming triviality of my own gripes against society, their lyrics are so powerful that they make me feel part of a larger movement against “the man” generally. But this sense of cultural displacement and guilt that I get from listening to hip-hop is certainly interesting.
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| Chuck D |
As I hinted at before, the only people who don't seem to have this problem are London and Birmingham based black kids. Obviously I'm talking about a very specific type of hip-hop here, but it seems strange that, as a genre generally, only a certain type of person has a "legitimate" right to listen to it. This may be the mainstream confusing genre with medium; there's a big difference between Flying Lotus and Eazy E. Even so, I think this is a wider issue of cultural "robbery." I'm sure some people get the same creepy feeling when they spot a white guy sporting a Run DMC or Wu Tang t-shirt in the as I do when I see a white dude with dreads.
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| *Shudder* |
