White-Washing Hip-Hop© Steve Juon
May 22, 1999
I hate to be the naysayer or the bearer of the negative news, but I smell something in the wind and it stinks like a hog refinement facility that just leaked it's manure waste reception into your local water supply. In
other words it's pollution, and it stinks - and it's the suddenly trendy and fashionable combination of white rockers doing what I would call "hip-rock" as a form of pseudo hip-hop. And I hate to say it, but I also think Eminem is to blame - and the naysayers who predicted this would happen after he blew up are right. The reason it's happening now is because everybody sees how successful Eminem was and they're trying to cash in on his success, and MTV is dutifully obliging.
What pushed me to finally say something? Seeing Limp Bizkit's video for "Nookie" - a song in which this white dood who looks EASILY more dorky than me in that Mountain Brothers photo is rapping about how much of a mack he is to this silly guitar beat, bragging about how he "took her nookie cause he only wanted a cookie" or some stupid shit over the chorus. This alone I could have laughed off, were it not for the suddenly explosive popularity of Kid Rock -- a man who just four years ago was laughed out of hip-hop for his "Grits For Breakfast" album and roundly criticized as being the epitome of a clueless whiteboy who wanted a piece of Vanilla Ice's action. Well, now he's got it with "Bawitdaba" - a song which perverts an old Sugarhill Gang chant beyond distortion to a rock and roll beat while Kid Rock brags about all the people he supposedly rocks the mic for and gets down with. What? What's going on? Why are we tolerating the Johnathan Davis' of the world while they popularize this psuedo-hip-hop schlock that has no heart, no funk, and no soul? You know the media loves this. They've WANTED to put a whiteface on rap and whitewash it so that the parents of the consumers can swallow a pill of violence and death as long as it has a white candy-coating. They can mock the dangerous anger and language of their black counterparts without seeming like a threat to white suburbia. These fools are practically the EPITOME of Offspring's "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" in a nutshell. After enduring a week of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock and Eminem I can
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