Paul Cantor
There’s no better time than the present to be a white rapper. In fact, if you’re African American, Latin, Asian, f*ck, anything else but white with pasty skin, you may want to consider f*cking around in another genre of music. White people own this sh*t right now. Which is sort of bad, but good. But also bad. And good.
Let me explain, because the onslaught of white rap is not exactly a new thing.
Hip-hop is now old as f*ck. In the 80s and 90s it was cute to be all like “oh, the genre is only x, y and z years old” and so on and so forth. And in that time when the culture was still shaping itself, it was hard to really assess the importance of what was going on. Luckily, the culture kind of self-policed itself in a way, ejecting wack sh*t (Vanilla Ice), and cosigning the good sh*t (3rd Bass). But that was back when there was a filter on music, and looking at it now, it’s easy to see that even despite this, white people and rap have had a weird relationship as it pertains to success dating back to the culture’s salad days. To wit, despite Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” being revered as one of the first extremely popular rap songs, the first rap-influenced song to ever top the Billboard Hot 100 was, in fact, Blondie’s “Rapture,” in 1981. See, it took a hot blonde white girl rapping to put hip-hop on top. Strangely, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
