Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English

and American Studies

English Language and Literature & Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools

Bc. Josef Eliáš

The Rapper That Happens to Be

White

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.

2015

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..

Author’s signature

I would like to thank my supervisor, J. Vanderziel, B.A., for his helpful guidance and kindness.

The moral support of Bc. et Bc. Dominika Sirná was also greatly appreciated.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

1. The roots of rap – Afro-American black music ...... 6

The textual level ...... 7

The Dozens...... 11

Black music ...... 18

The black music of the slaves ...... 19

The black music of the freedmen ...... 23

The institutional commercialization of black music ...... 28

2. The birth of hip hop culture ...... 35

South Bronxites ...... 38

Sample that – the birth of rap music ...... 41

The origins of rap music ...... 43

3. Indie vs. Major ...... 47

Commercialized authenticity ...... 51

Jay Z ...... 53

Macklemore...... 54

4. The rapper that happens to be white ...... 57

Marhall Mathers ...... 57 The rise of Eminem ...... 58

Authenticity vs. fiction ...... 61

Persona ...... 64

Double-sided persona ...... 68

5. Conclusion...... 73

Works Cited ...... 75

Introduction

Although the topic of this study was largely based on my fondness of hip hop music, the focus and scope of this work was inspired by a work of my colleague Petr

Homolka - his master’s thesis on the authenticity and commercialization of rap music.

When I was reading through Homolka’s work, one particular claim caught my attention:

“[Eminem’s] lyrics do not diverge from mainstream hip-hop production, which proves his status of another “black rapper”, as his tremendous success rests in his white skin and, above all, black persona.” (Homolka, 66). This association of Eminem’s music with black music on the basis of the content matter and his “persona” – a fictitious narrator – seemed to me as a bold claim at first, as it is actually accusing Eminem of cultural appropriation.

Yet the more I learned about the history of black music and the roles Caucasians played in it and still do, the more and simultaneously less sense Homolka’s claim seemed to have.

It made no sense that the music of one of the most commercially successful rappers would be so profitable if it was a result of co-optation of black cultural forms, now, in the 21st century. Additionally, music that contains lyrics rife with misogyny, graphic violence, homophobia and generally disturbing content, but which was awarded with several Grammy Awards. On the other hand, there have been instances of cultural appropriation of black music and after all, rap is an art from which should be allowed certain artistic freedom. Why should it be then treated differently, in comparison to other musical genres or other popular art forms, such as cinema, or drama, which can be surely similar in their portrayal of these negative aspects? The answer is not straightforward, but the fact is that both rap music and Eminem, one of the most successful white rappers to

1

this day, have been both surrounded by countless controversies, legal trials and discussions about the bad influence rap wields.

In my study, I will try to analyze the arguments which are used to accuse Eminem of co-opting rap music. The first cornerstone would be specifying the characteristics or the nature and history of the musical genre in question. Rap is generally associated with

African Americans (therefore the controversy about a white rapper), originating in the

New York’s Bronx among the non-white economically oppressed in the early 1970’s. But rap and the hip hop culture were not born out of thin air - it was a new artistic form, but largely depending on old musical pieces, molded by the principles and tendencies of black music.

To pinpoint what exactly from black music might be Eminem adopting in his work, rap music needs to be put into the larger context of the history and development of black music, which will be the objective of the first chapter. The focus here will be on the history and development of black music, as well as on the musical traits of black music, its influence and also commercialization. Both the textual level (the lyrics) and the musical traits (the sonic elements) will be taken into account, heavily depending on the work of Gates and his theory of African-American literary criticism, and Floyd’s work on the history, development, and influence of black music.

The second chapter will focus on the origin and development of hip hop and rap music in particular, reaching thus the year 1997, the year of the publication of Eminem’s first mainstream album.

The third chapter will discuss the types of record promotion and production. As was already mentioned, Eminem’s fame skyrocketed with his first mainstream album The

Slim Shady LP in the year 1999. This album was produced by Interscope Records, a major record label. Three years before that, Eminem made his first studio album Infinite,

2

produced by the independent label Web Entertainment - the sales and popularity of this album were nowhere near the success of The Slim Shady LP. By analyzing the differences between a major and independent record labels and subsequent implications for the authors themselves, there will be a first mention of the rappers chosen for the comparative analysis, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter four will employ narrative theory to analyze and describe Eminem’s narrative strategy, the distinction between his narrators, as well as his content matter.

Since Eminem is a mainstream artist, another successful white, independent rapper was chosen as his opponent for the comparative analysis – Macklemore from the duo

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, winners of the Grammy Award for the 2014 Best Rap

Album. To see if there are any significant differences between current white and black rap artists in terms of their narrative strategies and subject matter, Jay Z will figure as a representative of an Afro-American mainstream rappers.

Before specifying the objectives of my analysis, it should be explained why is narrative theory the preferred tool. This theoretical approach will be employed for the analysis of rap lyrics because they are generally literary texts, some of which have the structure of a narrative. Furthermore, the relationship between the author and the narrator(s) of his work, complicated in the case of rap by its emphasis on authenticity, will be best illustrated here by the example of the author in question, Eminem. There is

Marshall Mathers - the author and the man behind the pseudonym “Eminem”. Then there is the real-world Eminem, Mathers’ public persona of a rapper which is presented in his work as one of the narrators, but also in real-world public (starring in interviews, live concerts and such). Lastly, at the bottom of the hierarchy of credibility stand Eminem’s fictional personas talking to his audience from his music or music videos, i.e. the duo

Eminem and his alter-ego Slim Shady – these characters are described by Homolka as

3

‘black’. Narrative fictionality will be the key to understanding, for example, how could

Eminem win Grammy Awards in the early 2000 for his albums notorious for homophobic slurs, misogyny and vivid descriptions of violence just as he has won in 2015. The winner of the 2014 Best Rap Album, the duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, is chosen as Eminem’s

(independent) opponent for the comparative analysis, together with black rapper Jay Z to balance the scales of race and label affiliation.

Since Eminem is, figuratively, accused of performing in blackface in his songs, i.e. adopting the cultural and artistic forms of black rappers, the logical thing to do is to carry out a comparative analysis operating on two levels – on the level of race (hence the selection of Jay Z) and on the level of the binary opposition mainstream/independent

(therefore the choice of the independent duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis), which may refer to the level of rapper’s authenticity, his means of promotion and production (his record label association), or status in popular culture.

This analysis should be put in some context in terms of history of the hip-hop culture, the rap music genre and its commercialization, which had its unique implications for the music and the authors. In the beginning of the commercialization of hip-hop culture, the commercially successful rappers were predominantly black males before the first (few) white rappers appeared – DJ Flash (Billyjam), or Beastie Boys. This begs the question – does rap music ‘belong’ to African Americans? And is rap, as a musical genre, inherently a black creation, a black music? If so, is rap somehow related to other periods of black history, or is it solely a product of certain socioeconomic circumstances in the south Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s? If we make the assumption that rap “belongs”, or is a specific element of black culture, how do rappers of other races (in this example

Caucasians) create their rap songs – do they copy the forms of black rappers, or are their

4

lyrics different in some aspects which would go beyond differences between two rappers of any race?

The aim of this study is not a defense of the author in question, rather, I will strive to put Eminem in the larger context of black music – its characteristics, development and commercialization and analyze his work in comparison to the work of other artists to answer the question if Eminem can be rightfully accused of cultural appropriation.

5

1. The roots of rap – Afro-American black music

There were many people and things that influenced rap music in its beginning and during its development, but to answer the question whether rap is indeed a product and domain of Afro-American black culture, one must find rap’s parallels in the history of such culture. This can be carried out on various levels - rap music can be seen through the prism of its sonic component, or its textual level, which will be most relevant for the purpose of this study. This section not only provides a survey of rap’s antecedents, but by identifying and analyzing the elements of Afro-American culture’s influence on rap music it also provides the tools for the interpretation of Afro-American rap’s lyrics, which will be further employed in the analysis of the four rappers’ artistic expression.

In looking into the history of rap’s roots, Woldu leads the way: “Although modern hip-hop culture and rap music as we know it emerged in New York City during the mid to late 1970s, both have their roots in the long history of the African diaspora.” (25).

Woldu’s starting point is the slave music, aptly termed as “protest” music, since he makes a point that the general purpose of a song in African cultures was both a way of

“preserving communal values” and also an opportunity for an individual to voice their feelings and opinions, which would not be otherwise verbalized due to the restriction of their social environment (qtd. in Woldu 26). He further argues that this practice was still in existence in early African American slave communities and that through this channel one might recognize messages that are in style and meaning similar to the messages of rap music (28-9). His claim could be supported by comparing the slave songs commenting

(critically) upon the master (slave owner) or social conditions to the frequent subject matter of early rap music – i.e. critique of economic or social oppression, yet this comparison is just a remote association. A more telling argument would be the manner, or the code and function of such utterances. 6

The textual level

Henry L. Gates Jr., the author of The Signifyin(g) Monkey, a study of the relationship between the black English vernacular and African-American literature, traces the origins, principles and tendencies of the black vernacular tradition back to the West

Africa and the its local mythologies. By noticing the recurring similarities, Gates devised a theory of interpretation of Afro-American literature based largely on the African trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and its African-American rebirth in the form of

Signifying Monkey. This trickster figure then “stands as the rhetorical principle in Afro-

American vernacular discourse.” (44). Signifying Monkey features in numerous “toasts”

- tales or poems with certain fixed characteristics. He figures as one of the three protagonists of these narratives – the other two are a Lion, the king of the jungle, and a mighty Elephant. The Monkey is the main character of the story, as he tricks the Lion into a fight with the Elephant by using only his wits and guile. The Monkey uses in their conversation rhetorical devices which the king of the jungle cannot decode - he takes them literally and gets a beating from the Elephant whom the trickster Monkey involved in its scheme: “He [the Monkey] succeeds in reversing the Lion’s status by supposedly repeating a series of insults purportedly uttered by the Elephant about the Lion’s closest relatives (his wife, his “mama,” his “grandmamma, too!”) (Gates 56). This is the realization of one of the rhetorical devices which will be elaborated in more depth further on.

Essentially, in Gate’s theory of interpretation the Signifying Monkey stands for indirect rhetorical strategies. Gates coined a term for this black rhetorical practice which basically undermines the conventional two-part semiotic relationship between signifier (a word, sound, image, etc.) and signified (a concept, representing a real-word object or an abstract), proposed by the nineteen-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. To 7

differentiate it from Saussure’s model of signification, or signifying, Gates uses the term

Signifyin(g). He presents an observation by a late 18th century diarist, Nicholas Cresswell:

“In [the black’s] songs they generally relate the usage they have received from their

Masters and Mistresses in a very satirical stile [sic] and manner.” (qtd. in Gates 66).

Besides the abovementioned social critique, this example illustrates the point of marked signification, in Gates’ term Signification: by altering the signifier, basically substituting conventional concepts for new ones there was created a new mode of black communication – an African-American coded language, as Gates further documents with a seventy years younger excerpt of a writing by Frederick Douglass: [The slaves] would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out – if not in the word, in the sound [...] they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. (qtd. in Gates 67). Douglass here by referring to “unmeaning jargon” describes not only Black Vernacular English, in terms of Bühler’s communication model a code different from the standard English, but also a “mode of encoding”, as the meaning was determined by both sound and sense – an example of Signifyin(g) in practice.

Gates also briefly mentions (47) another example, which might be more telling, particularly in relation to rap music: the word nigger. Of course, nigger is still a racial slur to this day, but as one can notice in contemporary American society, African

Americans also use this term to refer to one another. The shift in meaning and function of this word is an excellent example of Signifyin(g): the original signifier nigger was in its form transformed into “nigga” by a rhetorical device called agnominatio, which repeats the word with a change in its spelling and sound (George 46). Andrew T.

Jacobs further elaborates on the change in the concept be specifying the rhetorical

8

process at play here: semantic inversion reverses the original meaning of the term, whereas chiastic slaying entails a “critique that transforms the status of a group or individual” (1). The new meaning is therefore, as in the slaves’ song, determined by both sound and sense. In Jay Z’s song If I Should Die from his album Vol. 2... Hard

Knock Life (1998), the form of address “my niggas” figures almost as an endearment, an expression of unity or collective identity and cohesion as suggested by the possessive pronoun:

If I should die don't cry my niggas

Just ride my niggas bust bullets in the sky my niggas

And when I'm gone don't mourn my niggas

Get on my niggas when it's real

Say word to Shawn my niggas

If I should die

By the transformation of the original meaning of the slur nigger the term “nigga” might not only acquire a positive meaning, but also connote a critique of racism in relation to the original connotations of the term, since the original slur still precedes its appropriated new version. Jacobs explains (2) that appropriating the racial slur and turning it into a

“rallying cry or ‘reverse discourse’ is a strategy of resisting its hostility, yet this is not a case of a mere appropriation of a word that still might hurt and humiliate African

Americans; what this transformation creates is a link between one group of historically disenfranchised minority and the dominant majority, as well as a link between the old term and the new one: “The interplay of the two signs sustains an antagonistic stand toward the dominant white community through the polemical comment: "this is how whites see us but we are something more". 'Nigga', then, is "authentically black" speech because it recognizes and maintains the divide between black and white worlds.” (Jacobs

9

11). The new term does not replace the old one, it Signifies on it and therefore indirectly comments upon it in the form of taking a stand against it. Simultaneously it utilizes it as a form of address and social cohesion: “The critique of racism and assertion of subjectivity implicit in the employment of 'nigga' is not aimed at white people or the elimination of their sign; it is aimed at black audience that must survive in a continually racist environment.” (Jacobs 16). The original term is therefore transformed through

Signifyin(g) repletion and revision into a term which could be termed as a resistive discourse, however, as is obvious, this is not a form of direct resistance.

Signifyin(g), therefore, is an indirect form of communication, a complex rhetorical device that is realized in a number of forms which could all be subsumed under the umbrella term of troping. “[Signifyin(g)] does not refer primarily to the signified; rather, it refers to the style of language, to that which transforms ordinary discourse into literature. [...] one does not Signify some thing; one Signifies in some way”. ( George 78).

For a demonstration of such troping, Gates provides a snippet of a conversation, characteristic of Signifyin(g) in a black community, borrowed from Mitchell-Kernan:

I: Man, when you gon pay me my five dollars?

II: Soon as I get it.

I: (to audience) Anybody want to buy a five dollar nigger? I got one to sell.

II: Man, if I gave you your five dollars, you wouldn’t have nothing to

signify about.

I: Nigger, long as you don’t change, I’ll always have me a subject.

(qtd. in Gates 83)

The communicative function at play here is to tease, or ridicule the first speaker in front of an audience. The role of a creditor, figuratively expressed as a slave owner, or the remark about the character of the debtor are both indirect ways how to carry out these

10

functions. As in the Signifying Monkey tales, there are three parties present – two speakers – opponents, and audience, which serves as a referee, judging the moves of each speakers – the other animals which determine Lion’s social status. Even though

Signifyin(g) can take numerous forms, there has been one that has a strikingly similar function and structure – the game called The Dozens.

The Dozens

The Dozens is a game that requires two players dueling each other verbally, ideally surrounded by an audience who decides who is the winner. Gates uses a snippet of one opponent’s utterance in this game to illustrate some of the tropes common in the

Western literary tradition.

Your mama’s a man (metaphor)

Your daddy’s one too (irony)

They live in a tin can (metonymy)

That smells like a zoo (synecdoche) (qtd. in Gates 86)

But as the name suggest, the dozens usually consist of twelve lines, which two opponents would take turns throwing at each other in front of a teasing audience in order to make the opponent admit their defeat, or provoke them into anger. Since this game was a source of quite a few academic speculations concerning the origin and function of the game,

Chimezie feels the necessity to dismiss some of them. As to the question of the origin of the game, she identifies a very similar game played by the Nigerian Igbo people and other

African societies (mainly by children and teenagers), thus proposing that this game is a part of African cultural heritage that survived the “oppressive cultural vandalism” the slaves had to face in America (414). Elijah Wald, a historian and also the author of the book The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama, supports this proposition by pointing out that the tradition of parent insulting, specifically mothers, is common in West Africa in 11

the context of boxing or wrestling matches as a form of provocation, or in the context of rites of passage, such as circumcision ceremonies. As for the function of the game, both

Chimezie and Wald point out that not only boys participated in this practice, but girls as well, thus dismissing the presumptions that the function of the game is to detach oneself from any signs of effeminacy.

The main principle of the game can be understood by its contextualization as a form of Signifyin(g) which is also originally derived from Western African mythology, and in the Afro-American context is based on the trickster figure of Signifying Monkey (Gates

44). The importance of the Dozens lies in its preservation of rhetorical devices which are heavily utilized in rap lyrics, as Rose acknowledges: “rapper's rhymes are clearly influenced by, if not a direct outgrowth of, the African-American toast tradition. The dozen-playing bravado of toasts such as the Signifyin(g) Monkey is brilliantly captured in Kool Moe Dee's "How Ya Like Me Now."62 (qtd. in Rose 86). Rose here establishes a direct link between rap music and the dozens game – her example, “How Ya Like Me

Now” is a ‘diss song’, a song supposed to disrespect authors’ opponents or enemies. Here is an example of it:

I heal life from the words I spread

I'll make a sick man rock on his death bed

Sucker MCs, I'll make your girl say "ow"

And she's jockin'

How ya like me now

Besides the figuration employed to express the prowess of the narrator, the insult “Sucker

MC’s” is meant to devaluate the opponent and to promote the status of the narrator. By involving a third party, the girlfriend of the opponent, the narrator further taunts him and acts superior. This involvement of a third person in a verbal battle is a frequent strategy

12

in the Dozens. Usually it is someone whom the opponent values – probably the most frequent person is the mother figure, as in the African version of the game, which, over the course of time reduced the game into the popular “Yo mama” jokes. Yet before that happened, the Dozens were a creative verbal practice among the African Americans, preserving the culturally specific rhetorical devices. Gates traces its geographical movement: “There can be little doubt that Signifyin(g) was found by linguists in the black urban neighborhoods in the fifties and sixties because black people from the South migrated there and passed the tradition along to subsequent generations.” (Gates 71).

Moreover, he documents this practice by quoting passages from Die Nigger Die!, the autobiography of the civil rights activist H. G. Brown: “I learned to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit [...] we exercised our minds [...] by playing the Dozens. (qtd. in Gates 72). To present the register of the game, which is commonly found in some of the genres of rap music, here is an example of Brown’s full ‘dozen’:

I fucked your mama

Till she went blind.

Her breath smells bad,

But she sure can grind.

I fucked your mama

For a solid hour.

Baby came out

Screaming, Black Power.

Elephant and the Baboon

Learning to screw.

Baby came out looking

13

Like Spire Agnew.

This utterance of the speaker is a thrown gauntlet – as Gates explains, “if the listener fails to do anything about it – what has to be “done” is usually quite clear – his status will be seriously compromised,” (qtd. in Gates 79), as in the tales of Signifying Monkey in which it is the preservation of his status in relation to the other animals which forces the Lion to confront the Elephant. This full dozen is also interesting in its form – one of the opponents would be allowed the time to recite the whole three stanzas, each by four lines. This time limitation, together with the structure and principles of the game, is strikingly similar to rap battles, a form of competition among rappers, which did not become so popularized

(commercialized) as the music itself. Yet, for the illustration – in the ending scene of the film 8 Mile, starring Eminem (Marshall Mathers) in the leading (autobiographical) role, the main character engages in Detroit’s local rap battle scene to win the respect of a predominantly black audience. The setting is the same as in the Dozens game – two opponents are given a time limit during which they are to verbally degrade each other – only in this instance, the rhymes are backed by a beat played by a DJ, thus determining the tempo. Both opponents use the same rhyming scheme, couplets, only Eminem’s last line is an exception, breaking thus the rhythm, which gives the last line a special prominence. After his opponent, Lotto, delivers his rhymes, the main character strikes back, ending with:

You see how far the white jokes get you

Boys like, "How Vanilla Ice gon' diss you?"

My motto: Fuck Lotto

I'll get the seven digits from your mother for a dollar tomorrow

(“B-Rabbit Vs. Lotto”)

14

If Eminem’s troping could be described as Signifyin(g) will remain to be seen in the subsequent analysis. For now, the reference to his role of a white rapper in the battle, associated with the infamous white rapper Vanilla Ice will be treated as a metaphor on the basis of race. The metaphor introduces the scenario in which Lotto is defeated by a rapper he previously underestimated by comparing him to Vanilla Ice, who infamously lost all hip-hop credibility by lying about his origin and social background. The general direct insult “fuck Lotto” is followed by a more personal and also indirect insult – the involvement of a close relative, characteristic to the dozens, figures as a metonymy based on the meaning of Lotto’s name (lottery). Eminem here claims that for a dollar he will

‘try his luck’ with Lotto’s mother, implying that his mother would have sex with him for money. This example is useful for its illustration that in this type of verbal dueling - what is actually valued is not what is said, but how it is said; how complex or creative tropes can a rapper create, on the spot. The manual for beginning rappers, How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC by Paul Edwards describes this practice followingly:

“Bragging and boasting, known as braggadocio content, have always been an important part of hip-hop lyrics and are an art form all in themselves. This type of content, combined with putdowns, insults, and disses against real or imaginary opponents, makes up the form known as battle rhyming.” (Edwards 25). In comparison to Lotto’s performance, then, it is Eminem who eventually wins the battle due to the witty play at his name intertwined with the involvement of Lotto’s close relative. Rap’s battle rhyming is clearly a musical realization of the Dozens game and therefore, is one of the forms of rhetorical devices that are generally subsumed under Signifyin(g).

But Signifyin(g) isn’t limited just to the game of Dozens which, as was demonstrated, serves as a structural model for rap battles. Yet Gates also presents an

15

example of Signifyin(g) outside of the context of the Dozens, again citing one of Brown’s texts (73), out of which here is presented only an extract:

Known from the Gold Coast to the rocky shores of Maine

Rap is my name and love is my game.

I’m the bed tucker the cock plucker the motherfucker

The milkshaker the record breaker the population maker

In this instance, Signifyin(g) isn’t used for verbal attack, it’s employed as a means of expression – a bravado of the speaker. What does not change, though, is the figurative mode in which the representation of the artists’ identity and status takes place. Of course, the figurative dexterity of such utterances, combined with the subject matter of the song, is bound to be met with incomprehension or renunciation by those from the audience who will take these figurative meanings in their literal sense. Such obscenities which were presented here in Brown’s text are not peculiar only to the oral African-American vernacular or its adoption by rap music; dirty language figures also in rap’s musical antecedents, as Rose points out: “[…] Early toasts are as vulgar and jazz and blues lyrics are as sexist as any contemporary rap lyrics” (24). As Elijah Wald explained in a radio interview, the form of the Dozens can be found also in black blues music of the late 1920s.

The song “The Dirty Dozen” from 1929 by Speckled Red only publicized the game which was already common among African Americans. In connection to the song, Wald points out the limited creative control over his music Red had when his record was published, since the published version was heavily censored in comparison to the version he was actually performing before putting it on a record – “this was filthy, every line of it was filthy, as filthy as anything in gangsta rap” (Wald). It is interesting to encounter this mention of limited creative control of an artist over his own music in an example as old as this, especially when the song is a projection of a form of black oral tradition. This

16

aspect of rap music, the influence the recording industry has over the work of an artist, will be discussed in the following section and later in chapter four. From a textual perspective, Wald expresses his fascination with the form of the song: “there’s this huge tradition of African-American verbal rhyming which has always been overlooked if it wasn’t in songs and that has surfaced in rap. And I’m not saying that the dozens is it, there are all sorts of aspects of that tradition [...]” (Wald). What he alludes to here is, once again, identified by Gates as Signifyin(g), manifested in one of its many realizations.

Gates himself addresses the issue of vulgarity followingly: “The Monkey tales generally have been recorded from male poets, in predominantly male settings such as barrooms, pool halls, and street corners. Accordingly, given their nature as rituals of insults and naming, recorded versions have a phallocentric bias.” (George 54). In her discussion of women in rap music Tricia Rose, the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, compares female rappers to the female singers of blues, pointing out that even in blues one could find gender-related cultural contradictions: “The blues has long been considered a musical form critical of dominant racial ideologies and a resistive cultural space for African Americans under harsh racist conditions. Yet, blues lyrics usually contain patriarchal and sexist ideas and presumptions.” (Rose 104). In essence, such expressions as sexism in music texts are a part of a larger frame of the discourse of cultural dynamics - as Rose calls it - “cultural struggle” (104). George provides another comparison, related to another black music genre: “In contrast to soul music, which evolved out of the black church, where a female sensibility is an essential part of the environment, rap’s sensibility was molded in the street where macho values have always dominated.” (George 184). These comparisons open the door for the following section, which will deal with the history of black music and the black musical genres which ultimately helped to define rap music.

17

Black music

As Eminem faces the accusation of co-opting black cultural forms, be it the music, expressive forms or black identity, the groundwork for the analysis would be characterizing these cultural forms. The previous section established a connection between rap lyrics and Afro-American rhetorical devices and thus introduced Signifyin(g) as the interpretative tool for the rap lyrics. What is left to be taken into consideration in this chapter is the black music, or rather, musicality of Afro-Americans that shaped the composition of rap songs. Since the question of cultural appropriation has also significant commercial implications, there will be a brief mention of the history of the commercialization of black music besides its development and characteristics.

Due to its emphasis on musical borrowing, there is still a lingering question about rap music being a subtype of black music, which also plays a part in the overall discussion of rap being a fully-fledged kind of music. Rose states that rap used to be faced with

Eurocentric accusations which did not value rap’s sonic nature as being worthy of the designation ‘music’ due to its focus on heavy rhythm and repetition and borrowing of sound recordings, known as ‘sampling’. Rather, rap was considered to be a “regression”

(81). These accusations share a certain similarity with early impressions of black culture

– Gates provides the example of Thomas Jefferson’s statement about black people being

“imitative” rather than “creative” (qtd. in Gates 66), which Gates refutes by explaining that “repetition, with a signal difference, is fundamental to the nature of Signifyin(g)”

(51), as was seen on the example of the appropriation of the slur nigger and the transformation of its meaning. Therefore, what used to be perceived as underdevelopment is actually a manifestation of a cultural difference, which in Jefferson’s case can be explained as an incomprehension of the underlying principles of Signifyin(g). To validate rap as a musical genre, moreover a musical genre associated with African Americans, 18

what follows is a brief history of African-American, or black music, and the shaping of its musical elements, principles and tendencies. The goal of the following section is to trace the origin and development of black (and later African-American) music and identify the typical traits of black musicality influencing rap music and thus justify its place among the black musical genres.

The black music of the slaves

As Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., the author of the book The Power of Black Music:

Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States, states, the concept of

Signifyin(g) can be applied to music, too, particularly in association with the sonic elements of black music:

[…] the calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony, and various

rhythmic, melodic, and other musical practices of the ring – since they are

used as tropes in musical performances and compositions – can serve as

Signifyin(g) figures. In studying the use of these devices in black music,

we come to see that these figures Signify on other figures, on the

performances themselves, on other performances of the same pieces, on

other and completely different works of music, and on other musical

genres. (Floyd, 7).

Floyd’s central idea is that the characteristics of black music can be traced back to the

African ring – a cultural practice combining music and dance that survived the Middle

Passage and which helped the transplanted Africans find common values and preserve them (qtd. in Floyd, 16). Floyd follows from Gates’s study of the African mythologies and vernacular traditions transplanted to the Americas and utilizes the theory of

Signifyin(g), but he also bases his study on the work of John S. Mbiti and his comparative approach to African religions and the work of scholars studying the nature of African 19

music – for both these fields there are findings in the form of implicit similarities which allow Floyd to talk generally about both an African religion and an African music (26).

In this aspect, Floyd’s work reminds of Gates’ study of the mythologies of African societies, except for Floyd’s focus being directed more at the common cultural (or rather ritual) and primarily musical aspects. To identify the traits of African-American music he traces the development and lasting influence of the ring shout and its components - Dance,

Drum and Song.

Starting in the West African homeland, Floyd provides a brief description of the

African musical sound ideal:

Africans’ overwhelming preference for timbres that contrast rather than

blend and their adoration of the resulting “tonal mosaic” as ideal for their

culture. Together, drum, rattle, bell, voice, and hand clasps not only

contrast but comingle – harmonize, in their own way – in a heterogenous

fusion that is unequivocally African. Such exclusive focus of this kind of

mosaic was carried into the diaspora and is the sound ideal of the ring; it

sonically defines ring music. (Floyd 28)

However, these ring rituals, transplanted to the New World, were among the Americans

(especially slave owners) seen as heathen rituals and were widely banned, since “These dances, in their ritual context, enforced and reaffirmed community, discipline, identity, and African cultural memory – an identity and a memory the slave owners sought to eradicate in order to make better slaves.” (Floyd 38). There are certain records of publicly permitted ‘demonstrations’ of African-like dancing and singing during the colonial times, but these were only cases of yearly “festivities”, held exclusively in a few places in the

North (Boston, New England and Manhattan) (Southern 57). But the ring shout did not disappear – it resurfaced in the religious practices of African Americans. Since the

20

concept of a supreme God was not new to the transplanted Africans, the transition to

Christianity was not at all impossible: “Catholic notions about the role of Christ, Mary, guardian angels, and patron saints as intercessors with the Father in heaven for men on earth proved quite compatible with African ideas about the intervention of lesser gods in the day-to-day affairs of human life, while the supreme god remained benevolent and providential but distant” (qtd. In Floyd, 39). Protestantism and its hymns provided these

African Americans with the foundations of its song and praise upon which they could build their own song – the African-American spiritual, which became through the

Signifyin(g) repetition and revision of the hymns the new Song in the Dance, Drum and

Song of the ring shout (Floyd 42). Among its most prominent musical features belonged

African-derived rhythms and frequent use of call-and-response figures – which stand for the interaction between a leader, a vocalist, and the rest of the singing group.

While ring shout and these spirituals were preserved by black churches in the free communities in the North, secular songs were also developing among African Americans from their early forms at the plantations: “there were work songs, rhyme songs, songs of satire, derision, and mimicry, songs of nostalgia and nonsense, children’s songs, lullabies and “songs of play and work and love […] repetitive songs designed to lighten labor or pass the time were ideally suited for the insertion of satiric or derisive lines” (Floyd 52).

These enabled the slaves a creative outlet directed at their peers and (indirectly) their masters. Furthermore, another component of the black musical tradition was passed from the plantations and African homeland: “The calls, cries and hollers of field workers and rivermen had been widespread, central, influential, and indispensable in slave culture from the beginning. […] When slaves and freedmen moved into cities to sell their wares or their masters, the cries of the field moved to the street with appropriate textual, tonal, and expressive modifications.” (Floyd 46-7). These calls, cries and hollers, together with

21

wordless hums, moans or shouts comprise very personal, emotional and intense musical expressions which found their way into African-American music, which, over the course of the adaptation to the New World sonically approximated its African sound ideal and had a lasting influence on the musical genres that were to come: “This ideal sound played a critical role in determining the nature of blues, ragtime, jazz, gospel, R&B, and all the other African-American musical genres, and it also influenced mightily the unique sound of American popular music in general.” (56). Before a brief description of these genres and their commercialization, a rather remote parallel can be drawn between the African music and rap music, based on a few striking similarities in the social function of the song as well as its delivery:

Africans “treat songs as speech utterances,” inspired, perhaps, by “the

importance of the song as an avenue of verbal communication, a medium

for creative verbal expression which can reflect both personal and social

experiences […] This accounts, to some degree, for an African

performance style characterized by “rapid delivery of texts, explosive

sounds or special interjections, vocal grunts, and even the whisper” in their

musical performances. (qtd. in Floyd)

Another striking resemblance of rap to African music would be its emphasis on the spontaneous narration – on improvisation, which is one of the most prominent feature of jazz music and a fundamental element of rap battles. Floyd likens jazz improvisations to toasts – the epic poems such as The Signifying Monkey – in this sense, jazz improvisations are musical renditions of “the troping and Signifyin(g) strategies of

African-American oral toasts” (7). But jazz and other musical genres stemming from the black musical tradition are the topic of the next section.

22

The black music of the freedmen

The Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1863 brought changes to black music as well as opportunities to those who were associated with it. The years after the

Emancipation signaled for a substantial number of African Americans a turn from

African-American community with its associations and values, as well as from a “cosmos controlled by black mythology” (Floyd 91) to a way of life driven by individual determinism. Floyd describes the mood of the generations of African Americans in the

South: “This psychological alienation from cultural roots, on the one hand, and the rejection by white society, on the other, resulted from many black Southeners in a dismal gloom that was both evoked and lifted partially by turn-of-the-century bluesmen.” (Floyd

91). The origin of blues and other subsequent musical genres associated with African

Americans was partly the influence of the newly gained freedom. Instead of the church, social gatherings of African Americans could be held in more secular places and had a rather relaxed, entertaining character. The so-called jook houses were establishments where African Americans danced to “rags [medleys of secular songs and spirituals], to songs of legend and fable (called ‘ballads’), to early blues and to prototypes of the music that would come to be called jazz.” (Floyd 66). Although the tradition of the ring and its spirituality was fading in these establishments, these dances were still stemming from the

African tradition. What was being preserved was the character of the black music:

Multimetric, additive, and cross-rhytmic configurations were retained in the

transition of African music into African-American music; their use defined the

character and quality of African-American rhythm and remain central to its

character and aesthetic power. The folk rags were performed primarily by banjo

players and by bands made up of fiddles, fifes, triangles, quills, and other

23

instruments that contributed to the heterogeneous sound ideal of the transplanted

Africans. (Floyd 66)

However, the jook houses were clearly not for everybody – those African Americans who strived for the acceptance of the white society would rather held “race improvement” dances more in accordance with the white European dances and avoided jook houses, naturally. Yet the black musicians played for both events; black bands as well as black composers were soon on the rise and the syncretization of these different kinds of music bore its fruit – new musical styles were born out of the musical traits of different musical genres, for example nineteen-century marches and African-American folk songs, which gave rise to ragtime (Floyd 71). Ragtime was distinctive for its “ragged” rhythm – its syncopation - the accentuation of beats which normally are unstressed. It had a significant impact on American music, especially near the turn of the century with the publication of

Scott Joplin’s immensely successful “Maple Leaf Rag” which is still popular to this day.

By the mid-1910s, however, ragtime songs slowly fused into popular music, while “piano ragtime inclined toward what later became known as jazz” (qtd. in Candelaria and

Kingman 227). Also the spiritual had its successor – the work (1896 – 1988) of the composers W. H. Sherwood and A. Tindley, the author of the song “Stand by Me”, popularized by Elvis Presley some 60 years later, lay the musical foundation for the later development of black gospel style (Floyd 63). Regarding the popularization, or rather commercialization of music associated with African Americans, the black spiritual was one of the first fully-fledged genres of African-American music. That is why it was the one of the first massively commercialized black musical genres.

The Fisk University, founded after the Civil War in 1866 as an educational institution for the freedman, utilized the promotion of spiritual for raising funds. Since the year 1871, when the first group of Fisk Jubilee Singers was established, these groups

24

toured American North and later in Europe as well (Candelaria and Kingman, 21), inspiring with their style and success other choral groups. By that time, however, the genre of African-American spiritual was already being exploited by white entrepreneurs.

Imitations of the spiritual were not only profitable for its publishers and performers, but also had a negative impact on the African-American minority: “Published in sheet-music form for voice and piano and designated for parlor and show performances, these imitations of the slave songs […] helped spur and sustain a theme then prominent in proslavery circles, the notion that freed slaves longed to return to the security and solace of their former houses.” (Floyd 60). Black music started to be treated not only as a distorted version of the African-American reality, but as a commodity with the advent of institutionalized music industry.

Publication and promotion of sheet music marked the beginning of a centralized music industry in the United States, represented by the New York-based publishing houses and songwriters that came to be collectively known as Tin Pan Alley. With the popular “coon song” craze in the 1880’s, Tin Pan Alley consolidated its lead in the production and promotion of sheet music, while simultaneously creating and reinforcing racial stereotypes of African Americans: black males were presented either as

[…] a fun-loving dandy, a chicken- or ham-loving glutton, a razor-totin’

thief, gambler or drunkard, or an outrageously unfaithful husband or lover.

The black female was presented [in illustrations] either as a very black, fat,

large-lipped mammy or carouser, or as a beautiful light-skinned ‘Yaller

Rose’ of Texas, showing the white male’s ostensible preference for

exploiting fair-skinned females as well as the African American’s

indoctrination into the preference for white ideals of beauty (Floyd 60)

25

These stereotypes, together with the stereotypes found in blackface minstrelsy were the two most artistically damaging influences on African Americans of the nineteenth century. Briefly – blackface minstrelsy was a theatrical performance based on the exploitation of the slave culture – its music and dancing, performed by white men since the 1820, reaching its peak during the years 1850-1870. There were two common types –

Jim Crow, the plantation slave impersonation, and Zip Coon, impersonating the city slave

– a fine dressed lover and dandy. (Southern 89). But minstrelsy was also an occupation of many black entertainers after the Civil War – not only performing, but also composing music and writing songs. For example, Southern mentions (242) Gussie Lord Davis, one of the most successful songwriters for black minstrels who was the first African-

American to succeed on Tin Pan Alley.

Tin Pan Alley made profits predominantly from the publication of sheet music until the 1920s; although the phonograph was invented in 1877 and its commercial utilization was already under way before the turn of the century, it was not until the 1920s that black music began to be recorded. The recording executives were either unaware of the genres popular among African Americans or did not see them as profitable. But when radio broadcasting started becoming popular in the 1920 and radio started to become a competitive medium for the phonograph records, both white and black music started gaining popularity and profitability – music, more than ever before, was being assessed not by its quality, but by its lucrativeness.

The genre that was the first to be most widely promoted, starting in the early

1920s, was blues, a genre described by Floyd followingly:

Musically, the blues probably took its most significant features from the

calls, cries, and hollers of field slaves and street vendors and from the

spirituals of brush harbors and church houses. It is a remarkable

26

manifestation of some of the primary features of African and African-

American song expression, making wide use of call-and-response figures,

elisions, repeated short phrases, falling and pendular thirds, timbral

distortions, ululations, vocables, hums, moans, and other devices typical

of music derived from the ring. (74)

In many ways, blues was the black secular musical reaction to the newly gained freedom but especially – deeply personal and lyrically raw. Yet this personal expression could be bought. As Candelaria and Kingman document, the “classic blues” period of 1920s –

1930s has seen blues being propagated mainly by phonograph recordings of hundreds of singers and millions of these recordings being sold. Interestingly, the first commercial artists were usually women: “The period of the classic blues was dominated by the female blues singer. Various reasons have been advanced for this, but the most likely ones have to do with the nature of show business at the time and the success of the female singers in tent and vaudeville shows.” (111). As the demand for records, distributed also by mail, grew larger, the search for traditional blues artists started after the commercial success of the male blues recording of Papa Charlie Jackson in the 1924. However, the promotion of music by African Americans followed the principle of racial segregation:

Race records was the trade term used for several decades for recordings by

black musicians intended for black consumers. […] Although a few

country-blues singers […] did eventually become well-known and

frequently recorded, many of the singers were exploited and treated with

disdain. (115)

Racial segregation, also projected in the commodification of black music, as well as

“passive resistance […] social aggression, and violence”, generally the negative stance of the white society towards the rights of the African Americans, combined with the

27

disintegration of community life and resulting sense of rootlessness were the influences which contributed to the employment of “psychological self-defense and self- empowering strategies, one of which was Sygnifyin(g).” (Floyd 92). Besides the rhetorical strategies employed on the textual level, the musical figures of African-

American music also Signify on other musical pieces and performances, the same way genres “Signify on other genres – ragtime on European and early European and American dance music; blues on the ballad; the spiritual on the hymn; jazz on blues and ragtime; gospel on the hymn, the spiritual and blues; soul on rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll and rock music […] funk on soul; rap on funk; and so on” (Floyd 95). This way, there is a constant musical progress, or rather a confluence of musical styles, in African-American music which builds on the features of its antecedents and other musical genres. As was apparent with the example of the black spiritual, or ragtime, African Americans cannot be always credited to ‘create’ a new musical genre solely out of their own musical tradition. Rather, the Signifyin(g) mode of creative repetition and revision gave rise to a number of distinctive musical styles and genres that were largely stemming from the principles of the black musicality – the musical principles of the African Dance, Drum and Song – and the conditions historically affecting African Americans since the early days of slavery. The next section will continue in the topic of the commercialization of

African-American music, or rather music historically associated with African Americans.

The institutional commercialization of black music

To reach large volumes of sales, the music industry needed to publicize and promote its songs, which became a fully-fledged profession, “in which ingenuity and brashness paid off. The exploits of these song pluggers included bribing performers across a wide spectrum – from established professionals to hopefuls who sang on popular 28

amateur nights (Candalaria and Kingman, 217). But the music industry had a more serious impact on the public – during the “golden years” (1920 – 1950) of Tin Pan Alley, the radio joined the phonograph recordings in replacing the piano as the source of music, thus turning the consumers into a passive role in their relation to music. As Candalaria and

Kingman document, before the Depression in the early 1930s, radio had replaced the profession of song pluggers and remained so to this day (217). What Tin Pan Alley had done for protecting the rights of copyright owners was helping establishing ASCAP –

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1914. However, as

Southern mentions: “The charter members, which counted 170 writers and twenty-two publishers, included only two African Americans […] The requirements for membership were rigorous, and only established composers could afford to join.” (311).

In the late 1920s and middle 1930s there were founded, among many other, two of the three big music record companies that would control the majority of the US music market after the year 2000 - American Record Corporation, founded in 1929 - today functioning under the name of Sony Music Entertainment; and Decca Records in 1934, attached to film studio Universal Pictures, today’s Universal Music. These two were later joined by Warner Bros. Records in 1958, today’s Warner Music Group. The majestic Tin

Pan Alley was slowly dying with the onset of “rock and roll” – a commercial term for faster, more rhythmical blues with pronounced beats, which was called “rhythm and blues” for the black audience, but “rock and roll” for the white listeners:

The intent behind masking rhythm and blues with the term “rock and roll”

lay in part with a need to reach a wider audience in the 1950s, when racial

politics had begun to reach a fever pitch in segregated American society.

[…] the earliest commercial uses of the term “rock and roll” had less to do

with a distinctive musical style than with marketing strategies that were

29

grounded in the social and racial politics of the day. (Cancelaria and

Kingman 122)

Rhythm and blues laid the foundation for rock and roll as well as for soul music – another record market label used by jazz musicians to refer to their sonic roots. (Floyd 136, 203).

It was Ray Charles who came with the actual style, combining the religious gospel sound and R&B music with occasional “blasphemous” character, as Floyd calls it: “’What I’d

Say’ [contains] moans, screams, sexual innuendo, and churchy piano [it] alternates and combines gospel-style call-and-response fervor with the erotic expressionism of R&B”

(204). Soul was gaining popularity in the 1950s and by the late 1960s and thanks to such names as Aretha Franklin or James Brown, it grew into a “worldwide social and commercial phenomenon”, as George describes it, attributing soul music such importance for hip hop that he goes so far as to say (IX) that soul music was the foundation for the generation who witnessed or participated on the birth of hip hop culture.

The other genre of the 1950s - the rock revolution, and its profits, strengthened the position of corporate record companies – as George documents (3), the revenues from rockstars expanded the music market and led to the consolidation of power within the corporate record labels, which needed to be constantly growing to satisfy the demand.

African-American music, catered since the end of the WWII by small, independent labels, became the target of the corporate music industry’s expansion. Following the example of

Motown record company which was successfully selling black R&B derived music to white teen audience in the 1960s, the mainstream record industry (Warner Brothers,

Polydor, RCA, and others) set up special “R&B”, or “black music”, divisions. As George

(3-4) explains:

In essence they were established to employ African Americans to sell

black popular music within their community and identify performers with

30

“crossover” appeal. [...] In terms of employment opportunities, salaries,

and advances paid to artists, this was an important development worth

celebrating. [...] these black divisions were the farm teams, from which

crossover stars, such as the O’Jays, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Michael

Jackson, would be developed.

Yet the black executives of these departments were not given the full authority to produce records. On top of that, the actual producers would interfere in the sound of the records and the real power of promoting black artist was in the hands of white radio executives who did not cater for the musical taste of the artists or black listeners. As the music industry doubled in its size from 1973 to 1978 (qtd. in Candelaria and Kingman, 130), its new strategy was to focus on efficient marketing based on clear-cut genre labels and radio promotion, as well as taking into consideration the rise of the black middle class.

To complete this chapter, devoted to the description of the character and development of African-American music, its fundamental genres and black musicality, let us return to the issue mentioned at the beginning of this chapter – i.e. rap music being challenged as a legitimate musical genre, given its heavy emphasis on rhythm and sampling. The question of sampling will be investigated in the following chapter, but for the rhythmic element of rap musical composition, the crux of the matter is in the preferred musical features of Western music: “Unlike the complexity of Western classical music, which is primarily represented in its melodic and harmonic structures, the complexity of rap music, like many Afrodiasporic musics, is in the rhythmic and percussive density and organization. (qtd. in Rose 65). Rose employs Snead’s approach to music as an embodiment of social world of a given culture, thus encompassing “assumptions regarding social power, hierarchy, pleasure, and worldview” (70). In this concept, repetition plays a significant role, maintaining a sense of “continuity, security, and

31

identification” (qtd. in Rose 68). The incompatibility of the musical systems of the

Western culture and black cultures then Snead interprets as follows: “European culture

"secrets" repetition, categorizing it as progression or regression, assigning accumulation and growth or stagnation to motion, whereas black cultures highlight the observance of repetition, perceiving it as circulation, equilibrium. (qtd. in Rose 69). Additionally, this equilibrium is not a static element in black music. The repetitiveness is frequently abruptly disrupted, which is one of the most prominent rap music: “black musics

(especially those genres associated with dance) use the "cut" to emphasize the repetitive nature of the music by "skipping back to another beginning which we have already heard," making room for accidents and ruptures inside the music itself.” (Rose 70). Rose presents

Snead’s philosophical interpretation of the “cut:”

In black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates, there in an

equilibrium. . . . In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just

circulation and flow, but accumulation and growth. In black culture [...] If

there is a goal [...] it is always deferred; it continually "cuts" back to the

start [...] Black culture, in the "cut," "builds" accidents into its coverage,

almost as if to control their unpredictability. (qtd. in Rose 69)

The relation of these principles of musical composition to rap music is relevant to the topic of rap’s musical antecedents. Snead’s favoring of “the Godfather of soul”, James

Brown, due to his mastery and development of the “cut” applies to the nature of rap music itself. Rose states that James Brown has his prominence in rap music since “hip hop producers had communally declared James Brown's discography the foundation of the break beat”, and his characteristic shouts (“hit me!” or “"take it to the bridge!") together with “rapid horn and drum accents and bass lines would soon become the most widely used breaks in rap music. (70). The characteristic breaks in rap music are therefore a

32

contribution of soul and funk musical figures. The ingenuity of the “cut”, or break, is in the fact that the break "does not cause dissolution of the rhythm; quite to the contrary, it strengthens it." (qtd. in Rose 70). However, the break is not the only characteristic feature of rap music which rap adopted. Sampling technology, the seed of rap’s growth, was in use long before DJ Kool Herc started using it for his B-beats, but that is a subject for the next chapter.

To sum up the findings of this chapter – rap’s textual (rhetorical) principles were traced back to the societies of West Africa via Gates’ concept of “Signifyin(g)”, which is derived from the African-American toasts featuring the trickster figure of Signifyin(g)

Monkey. The rhetorical devices for which Signifyin(g) stands for were identified in the forms of slave protest music and further traced by the tradition of the game of Dozens, which is one of the means of preservation of these indirect rhetorical strategies. The relationship between the Dozens and rap lyrics was suggested, thus providing the interpretation tool for the lyrics of rap songs. Rap’s musical roots were attributed to the lasting influence of African homeland and its ring tradition, characterized by Drum,

Dance and Song. The musical genres stemming from the sound ideal of the African music, originating either from the cultural memory of transplanted Africans or the syncretization of black music and American or European music were described as having their distinctive tendencies and traits and thus, in comparison with the Western musical composition differentiate rap from the Western music and appreciate rap as a distinctive type of African-American music. The commercialization of African-American music was briefly described in association to censorship, exploitation and commodification of

African-American music in relation to the birth of American music industry and its development.

33

These findings must be associated with Rose’s general claim about rap’s origin and inspirations:

Clearly, rap's oral and protest roots, its use of toasting, Signifyin(g),

boasting, and black folklore are vitally important; however, these

influences are only one facet of the context for raps emergence. Rap's

primary context for development is hip hop culture, the Afrodiasporic

traditions it extends and revises, and the New York urban terrain in the

1970s. (Rose 25-6)

Before the move to the ravaged South Bronx, the birthplace of rap and hip hop culture at the time of the “worst economic conditions for the underclass since the Depression”

(George XIV) - the early 70’s, to have the benefit of hindsight, let us take a walk to the

Midtown Manhattan some forty years later, where rap was invited to star in a popular late-night talk show.

34

2. The birth of hip hop culture

On the 29th September 2010, rap came under the spotlight on Late Night with

Jimmy Fallon. Fallon, the host of this American late-night show, teamed up with the pop singer Justin Timberlake and together they performed a medley of rap hits called “History of Rap”. Starting with “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang, these two white entertainers had put together a compilation of rap hits that ultimately spanned the 36 years of rap history when they performed the sixth part of the medley in 2015 on The Tonight

Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

In this latest part, Jimmy started fiercely rapping “Straight outta Compton / crazy motherf...”, before Timberlake interrupted him, calmed him down, and shaking his head said to him: “Jimmy, we’ve been through this before. You are not straight outta Compton, you are straight outta Upstate New York.”. Fallon, who looked like just having been woken from a dream, bowed his head and agreed.

There is no direct relevance of this example to the aim of this thesis - rather, it will serve as a way of illustrating some aspects of rap music and hip hop culture that are relevant to the analysis ahead. The issues illustrated here will be further elaborated on in the rest of this chapter, which will look into the history of rap music, hip hop culture, and its commercialization.

Interestingly enough, there might be at least two hypothetical reasons why

Timberlake stopped Fallon short from adopting the persona of a black L.A. rapper Easy-

E (the rapper of the song “Straight Outta Compton”). The first one is obvious - to steer clear of the vulgar language - yet Fallon’s show is not exactly shy of using a few profanities in its sketches. As Krims points out in his book Rap music and the poetics of identity, the musical poetics of rap cannot be properly analyzed without taking into account the issues of race, social class and other factors, such as the geographical location, 35

or means of production, circulation and consumption (201). These factors will be crucial for the analysis of the four rappers selected for this study, but before that, a brief preview will be presented using the example of Fallon’s show.

As a matter of fact, the song Fallon was about to perform may be a part of one of the most controversial and characteristic rap albums ever made. The 1988 album Straight

Outta Compton by the group N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) helped to define a whole musical genre (‘gangsta’ rap) and stands for such a distinctive part of Afro-American history that its rendition by a white celebrity may be viewed as tactless and perhaps politically incorrect. So, even though occasional vulgar language is nothing extraordinary on Fallon’s show, the obscenities and images of violence contained in the lyrics of

“Straight Outta Compton” may have been too much:

Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube

From the gang called Niggas Wit Attitudes

When I'm called off, I got a sawed-off

Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off

You too, boy, if you fuck with me

The police are gonna have to come and get me (N.W.A.).

As Krims explains, gangsta rap “describes gang life, or more generally, life in the ghetto from the perspective of a criminal (or liminal, transgressive) figure” (Krims 70). NWA’s figurative violent and threatening resistance to racial profiling may simply not be appropriate to be adapted by a white celebrity.

As for the second reason, Fallon’s origin might be in stark contrast to the social conditions of black inhabitants of the suburb of Los Angeles in the eighties – gang violence, drug trafficking, police brutality and racial profiling truly paint a different picture than the present popular tourist destination for which the predominantly rural

36

Upstate New York stands for. Yet this is not the only difference concerning geography that might be at play here.

Since hip hop was born in one of the boroughs of the City of New York, the city for a long time figured as a mark of authenticity in relation to geography and musical style. Up until 1989, New York had a ‘monopoly’ over rap music, a “monopoly on representing”, as Krims calls it (123). Being somehow associated with New York, be it in terms of geographical location, or certain music style, used to be for an artist a way of expressing and anchoring their hip hop identity. It was N.W.A. who most notably defined their music as a counterpart to the New York symbol, both in terms of style (defining a specific West Coast rap music style called G-funk) and local (and political) identity. For that reason, Fallon’s rendition of a song coming from the opposite coast is a theoretical establishment of the West Coast vs East Coast dichotomy. Of course, this is just an illustration of a certain principle of authenticity of a rap artist, as Timberlake and Fallon had no trouble performing, or rather imitating, songs which geographically span the whole U.S.

A similar speculation would be considering the two white entertainers, performing songs by black artists, to be a form of cultural appropriation, similarly to the premise of this study. While such an analysis is to be yet made, the starting point for it could be found even in this example. The last part of the medley, called “History of Rap 6”, currently has about 19 million views on Youtube. In comparison to another of the Tonight

Show clips featuring the British actor Daniel Radcliffe rapping “Alphabet Aerobics” by the African-American hip-hop duo Blackalicious, counting 57 million views, “History of

Rap” may be said not to be that much popular. However, judging by the number of views on Youtube, this may be definitely said about the original “Alphabet Aerobics:” the official upload has about one million views; together with the unofficial uploads this gives

37

about 10 million views. These numbers speak for themselves - a trend of commercialization (starting with “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979), or perhaps appropriation of black music by white artists, producers or entrepreneurs is suggested in both of these simple examples.

Further on, out of the total of over 140 artists featured in the compilation, be it individuals such as 2 Pac or groups like Salt-n-Pepa, only 7 of the 140 were white -

Eminem, Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, House of Pain, Prince Markie Dee from The Fat

Boys, Snow and Macklemore. Although this finding does not reflect the actual ratio of

Caucasian rappers versus other races, naturally, it does suggest that there are not many commercially successful white rappers in the history of American rap, which would make it a domain of black rappers, as will be discussed further on in relation to the origins of hip hop and the inherent principles of rap music. However, it should be pointed out that this representative sample comprises of rap hits – songs which peaked in popular music charts such as the Billboard music chart and which became a part of popular mainstream culture. This aspect, the way an artist becomes a part of mainstream culture, will be also taken into consideration before the analysis of the role of race in rap music.

To sum up the aim of this section, the goal was to present certain aspects related to the analysis of rap songs. The issues of music genre, the rapper’s identity associated with social status, geographical location, and race, as well as artists’ presence in mainstream culture were introduced, only to be further on elaborated in more detail. In further sections these rap hits will be provided with socioeconomic and cultural background that allowed them to be created.

South Bronxites

Back in the time when rap was in its infant years, the socioeconomic conditions of the underclass were in a stark contrast to the 2010s. Despite its legal abolishment, racial 38

segregation did not just disappear and neither did white supremacy (the belief that white race is superior to other races, especially to the black race in the context US society).

George aptly describes the period influence on the first hip hop, or first post-soul generation:

Post-soul kids grew up with the Vietnam War. Their fathers came back with drugs

and bad dreams – if they came back at all. As they grew up, both the black middle

class and the black lower class expanded; they grew up with Wall Street greed,

neo-con ideology, Atari Gameboys, crack, AIDS, Afrocentricity, and Malcolm X

as a movie hero, political icon, and marketing vehicle. They saw Nelson Mandela

walk out of jail and Mike Tyson walk in. (xi)

The 1970s were a chaotic period for the young generation of African Americans. Rose mentions several main black musical genres that are associated with particular historical conditions of African Americans – jazz as a reaction to racial segregation, or R&B as a reaction to inequality that sparked the civil rights movement. For rap, Rose identifies its primary points of emergence: “Rap’s primary context for development is hip hop culture, the Afrodiasporic traditions it extends and revises, and the New York urban terrain in the

1970s” (26). The economic influence including the immigration patters from Third World countries, new technological advancements or global economic competition had their specific impact on the job market and social mobility of the urban terrain of New York

City. The poorest residents were in this time of high unemployment and poverty of the underclass furthermore relocated for the purpose of building a new freeway from various areas of New York City to one area – South Bronx. However, from the environment of poverty, severed community ties and social isolation rose a community formed by the young generation of black and Hispanic people who forged their distinctive identities in the face of socioeconomic oppression: “Hip hop culture emerged as a source for youth of

39

alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished along with large sectors of its built environment.”

(Rose 34). In the ghetto of South Bronx, the youths who either could not move out or had to move in started to recreate the ties of their former communities and form alternative groups, which heavily influenced the nature of hip hop culture: “Identity in hip hop is deeply rooted in the specific, the local experience, and one’s attachment to and status in a local group or alternative family. These crews are new kinds of families forged with insulation and support in a complex and unyielding environment and may serve as the basis for new social movements.” (Rose 34). The street identity is still one of the features of authenticity in rap music, a lingering influence of the hip hop’s core culture. Rappers such as Jaz Z still anchor their identity in the character of a gangster, most notably in albums such as his debut album Reasonable Doubt, or American Gangster. But the gang culture did not last long in the New York City – Africa Bambaata, one of the pioneers of hip hop culture and a former member of the youth gang Black Spades replied to George’s question – and popular assumption - whether hip hop culture replaced the gangs during the mid-1970s: “The women got tired of that gang shit, so brothers eventually started sliding out of that ‘cause they had people that got killed.” (18). Africa Bambaataa eventually founded his organization called Zulu Nation, thus formally laying the foundation for the hip hop culture by determining and bringing the elements of hip hop together: “Zulu Nation, a collective of DJs, breakers, graffiti artists, and homeboys that filled the fraternal role gangs play in urban culture while de-emphasizing crime and fighting.” (18). But the seed of hip hop’s music was planted by somebody who utilized technology to come up with what proved to be the elementary principle of hip hop music

– sampling.

40

Sample that – the birth of rap music

Nicki Minaj’s song and music video Anaconda, which brought her the MTV

Music Video Award for Best Hip-Hop Video in 2015 and a Grammy nomination in the same year, brings the 1992 celebratory song of women’s bottoms I Like Big Butts (1993

Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance) by Sir Mix-a-Lot into the 21st century.

It does so by borrowing its beat, a snippet of the chorus and mainly the subject matter of the song. While Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song was a part of a mack genre tradition, whose, as

Krims argues, “contribution to rap’s reputation as misogynist music is undeniable,” and which was predominantly a domain of male rappers (62-3), Nicki Minaj recreates the song and subverts the genre by adopting its sexual objectification for her own artistic expression of ‘sexual politics’. In other words, she embraces the male-driven dynamics of the mack genre for her own ends, no matter how overtly sexual the video is.

The method described above as musical “borrowing” is called sampling and is one of the elementary components of rap music. Henry Gates, in the introduction to his revised Signifyin(g) Monkey refers to sampling as to “embedded signification”, as the process consists of quotation rather than repetition and revision, but at the same time it includes the connotations of the original piece, as was evident in the textual example of the transformation of the meaning of the slur nigger. Gates therefore rather speaks about

“revision through recontextualization” by referring to James Snead’s study of repetition as a figure of black history: ““when you repeat a prior work of art, you bring it and all its connotations back, so that there are always two dimensions, past and present, repetition and revision, working at the same time.” (qtd. in Gates XXXI). The phallocentric sample of the original I Like Big Butts is therefore recontextualized so that the position of the woman is technically unchanged – the woman is still objectified - but it is Nicki Minaj who objectifies her own body, which puts her in the position of power, 41

as the video of Anaconda tellingly depicts when Nicky seduces Drake, another famous rapper, who sits frozen on a chair and does not dare to touch the hypersexual body of

Nicky Minaj – all he can do is passively look.

Sampling therefore refers to using a sound recording, or a sample, for the purpose of another song. Even though Nicki Minaj heavily sampled Sir Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song, his song is not an entire “original”, since he sampled a beat of the Channel One's single “Technicolor” from the year 1986, which does not even belong to the same genre of music. Floyd refers to sampling, in relation to jazz, as to musical Signifyin(g):

In other words: musical Signifiyn(g) is troping: the transformation of

preexisting musical material by trifling with it, teasing it, or censuring it.

Musical Signifiyn(g) is the rhetorical use of preexisting material as a

means of demonstrating respect for or poking fun at a musical style,

process, or practice through parody, pastiche, implication, indirection,

humor, tone play or words play, the illusion of speech or narration, or other

troping mechanisms. (8)

The cross-genre scope of sampling is exactly what gave birth to rap music – in fact, it is the fundamental principle of rap music. That might be the reason why Gates goes so far as to say that “[…] without a doubt, the most prevalent manifestation of signifying over the last four decades is to be found in the corpus of hip-hop music. You might say that hip-hop is signifying on steroids.” (Gates XXIX). Sampling extends the tradition of

Signifyin(g) repetition and revision with the help of technology which was in many cases molded to the specific needs of DJs to create links between the current moment in music and the music, artists, or meanings of the past – the use of sampling therefore does not merely recycle old records, it may comment on them, pay homage to their authors, follow or expand their musical tradition, or create collages of musical snippets

42

that may be considered original works of music while simultaneously reviving and acknowledging its predecessors and their merits.

The origins of rap music

In the January issue of Billboard magazine of the year 1978 the readers could find in the “Disco” section an article by Robert Ford Jr., titled “B-Beats Bombarding

Bronx,” with a lead “Mobile DJ Starts Something With Oldie R&B Disks”. Ford describes unusually rising demand for “obscure R&B cutouts” by young black “disco”

DJs who are interested only in 30 seconds of the whole record - “the man responsible for this strange phenomenon is a 26-year old mobile DJ who is known in the Bronx as

Kool Herc. It seems Herc rose to popularity by playing long sets of assorted rhythm breaks strung together.” (Forman and Neal, 41). What made Kool Herc, a Hawaiian immigrant, so popular, was utilizing the technology used by disco DJs – the turntable, playing a record, and the mixer, which created a seamless transition from one turntable to the other. Kool Herc devised a technique of mixing called merry-go-round – essentially playing only the instrumental breaks using two turntables – thus possibly extending the 30 seconds into a full track while mixing it with other breaks or parts of records. This technique was the technical blueprint for the music of hip hop. As this technique was adopted and enriched by other inventions by other DJs who were quickly spreading the popularity of this music at parties and gatherings outside on the street, in parks, or clubs, the seed of a new community practice, and later of a whole new culture, was planted.

Hip-hop refers to a culture comprising of several elements, one of which is the vocal expression, rap. Some time has passed by since Africa Bambaata, one of the founding fathers of hip hop, has established the four elements of hip hop: rapping (or emceeing), DJing, breakdancing and graffiti-writing (qtd. in Homolka 22), because hip- 43

hop culture now also includes such elements as beat-boxing or fashion and has penetrated many spheres of (not only American) culture, be it television, fashion, movies, or music and language. But in the early days it was not only the music that was bringing the people together, the elements of hip hop were influencing each other. Rose depicts this relationship: “In the earliest stages, DJs were the central figures in hip hop; they supplied the break beats for breakdancers and the soundtrack for graffiti crew socializing.” (47). In contrast to the uninterrupted and fluid disco dancing, breakdancers were reacting to the music of the DJ – to the heavy beats or the break in the music.

Dancing was usually done in a ring setting, each dancer having his chance to step into the ring and perform his moves. At the end of his dance, he or she would sign off with a freeze pose, interrupting the continuity of his performance and simultaneously challenging the next dancer to outdo them. (qtd. in Rose 47). This practice is very much similar to the African ring and its Dance, Drum and Song – if not for its transcendentality, then for its communal practice, social interaction and subjectivity within a larger body of the dancers. Although the first generation of breakdancers were mainly African Americans, it was the Hispanics who saw to it that breakdancing would not disappear by making it competitive, as George describes: “Breaking crews, in the long tradition of urban gang culture, challenged other dancers to meet them at a specific playgroud, street corner, or subway platform. […] Like basketball, it was a team sport but it relied on the skill of individuals within each crew.” (15). But not only breakdancing was competitive – Bronx was divided into four terrirotires: “Kool Herc’s territory was the west Bronx, Afrika Bambaataa dominated the Bronx River East, DJ

Breakout’s terrirory was the northernmost section of the Bronx, and Grandmaster Flash controlled the southern and central sections. These territories were established by local

DJ battles, club gigs, and the circulation of live performance tapes.” (Rose 53). DJs

44

were perfecting their techniques and started to talk to the audience to excite the crowd to stimulate their reaction to the music. When this role was passed to another person, a rapper, or a master of ceremonies (MC), was born, a storyteller who would not only communicate with the crowd using simple call-and-response figures, but also complement the DJ’s music with his short narratives or routines. Even though rapping was gaining more attention than spinning records or graffiti writing, it was still a part of the music and the culture of hip hop:

Stylistic continuities were sustained by internal cross-fertilization

between rapping, breakdancing, and graffiti writing. Some graffiti writers

[…] produced records. Other writers drew murals that celebrated favorite

rap songs [and] drew murals for DJ’s stage platforms and designed

posters and flyers to advertise hip hop events. […] Breakdancers, DJs,

and rappers wore graffity-painted jackets and tee-shirts. (Rose 35)

However, when a first rap hit, “Rapper’s Delight” by an unknown, originally makeshift group Sugarhill Gang, was recorded and produced by Sylvia Robinson, the hip hop community was robbed of something, as it marked

the art’s entrance into the public sphere of worldwide cultural discourse,

where it has remained ever since. The decentralized face-to-face social

dynamic which marked early hip hop was thus given way to a different

dynamic, one mediated by way of commodity such as vinyl, video and CD.

These configurations have separated hip hop’s vocal discourse (i.e., “rap”)

from its early contexts of communal production, encouraging closed

narrative forms over flexible word-play and promoting individualized

listening over community dance. (Dimitrias in Forman and Neal, 580).

45

In the same manner as when the radio broadcasting turned its audience into passive listeners rather than active participants of the music making, commercialization not only changed the nature of rap music as a communal practice, but also influenced the character and content matter of rap songs - the affiliation with the music industry and its conditions limited the creative control the artist has over his own work.

46

3. Indie vs. Major

Generally, there are three paths a rapper can take to launch their career: go their own way of promoting themselves and distributing records, close a deal with an independent label, or sign a contract with a major recording company. Lee mentions the difference between the last two:

First, the main criterion used for distinguishing 'indie' and 'major', the

exclusive use of independent manufacturing and distribution outlets by

independent labels, has grown less common. Instead, 'independent' labels

frequently strike elaborate P&D deals [pressing and distribution deal] with

major labels. Second, major labels have largely appropriated much of the

language and 'style' of independent labels as part of new marketing

strategies. (Lee 15)

Lee’s take on the difference between an independent (‘indie’) and major label is that it is minimal on the economic level – an indie label is basically a scale model of the major label as it operates with a smaller budget, which usually enables it to target only a specific and limited group of listeners. Therefore, the significant difference is in the business philosophy of these two. Many starting artists (who have certain potential) sign with an independent label which offers a receptive approach and a bigger creative control for the artist over their music and public image (Record Company). If the artist is dissatisfied with the reach of the indie label, they might go over to the major label, which has the resources to offer the artist exclusive and professional services in promotion and distribution. However, this deal comes at a price, as Amanda Palmer, the American singer-songwriter aptly depicted: “I, like many artists, fundamentally detest being told what to do by others” (Greenburg, “Amanda”), by which she justifies her reasons for leaving her (major) label, Roadrunner Records, which asked her to re-edit her music video 47

in 2009 because “her stomach wasn’t flat enough” (qtd. in Anderson 195). Palmer’s reaction, resulting in a release from her contract with Roadrunner, is peculiar to the 21st century – the age of the Internet. After the release, she started a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, collecting $1.2 million dollars instead of her original goal of $100,000 for making and distributing her new album. Her remarkable success in raising such capital lies, as she revealed in an interview with Forbes, in having a solid fan base she is in constant interaction with via social media (Twitter, or her blog) or actual contact

(Greenburg, “Amanda”). The surprising thing is that, as she disclosed: “I pretty much broke even on that Kickstarter. I did it almost deliberately because I wanted my fans to trust the shit out of me and they do.” After this experience, Palmer continued in using other crowdfunding means for raising her capital. The crucial difference from the major label collaboration is that Palmer relied entirely on her contact with her fans as a means of building a community, establishing rapport with them and getting their feedback; her promotion was solely in her hands instead of the hands of music industry professionals in charge of the promotion of an artist. Palmer’s approach is in many ways similar to the marketing strategies and management of the independent white rapper selected for the comparative analysis - Macklemore. It is also reminiscent of the early days of hip hop, not in terms of music production, but in terms of local (in this case online) community life and contact with audience.

As early as 1995, Lee pointed out the nonsensical differentiation between an independent and major record label on the basis of economic independence: “Over the past ten years the majors have systematically purchased all of the larger independent record companies operating in the USA. Independent record labels such as Island, A&M,

Motown and Virgin proved attractive targets since they each had large and often successful artist rosters.” (Lee 16). There were several of the majors he speaks about– in

48

1995, there were six of them, out of which there remained three after the year 2012 –

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, which is the majority owner of Roadrunner Records, Palmer’s former label. Through this kind of hierarchy, the majors control a majority of the US and world music markets – in 2004 the majors controlled around 80% of the United States music market” (qtd. in Knab). But as

Greenburg documents (“Revenge”), since the U.S. album sales had steadily declined since 2000 (the total album sales in 2000 were 785 million, in 2015 mere 257 million), the music industry had to adapt to the new era of streaming music: “So far two dominant streaming models have emerged: Internet radio companies like Pandora that allow subscribers to passively listen to music that’s customized for their tastes and interactive ones like Spotify that allow users to pick songs.” (Greenburg, “Revenge”). One type of the industry’s reaction was the introduction of a special kind of a record deal, called

“360”, or “multi-rights” deal, which goes beyond the profits from recordings – the label therefore financially participates with their artist in a range of their own activities, such as merchandising, TV or movie appearances, touring and others. However, the biggest deals have not been signed by major labels, but by Live Nation, “the world’s largest concert promoter” (Marshall 78). When a star like Madonna signed a (monstrous) deal in

2007 not with a major record company, but with Live Nation, a tour promoter, it was evident that the power structures in the music industry are shifting. In exchange, Live

Nation would get a portion from literally everything Madonna would do that is related to music (qtd. in Marshall 80) for a certain time period. Live Nation signed an even bigger deal in 2008 with Jay Z, which is where this discussion becomes relevant. What is the essential difference between the deal of Kurtis Blow, the first rapper signed to a major label in 1979, and Jay Z with his 360 deal in 2008?

49

The answer is in the shifting focus of the music industry. Blow’s record deal was, maybe not surprisingly, about producing records and creating demand for them. But in the case of the 360 deal, as was mentioned in relation to Madonna’s deal, the contract is to the label more of a profit-sharing deal than recording contract, as Marshall puts it (84).

This is also the reason why the majors renamed themselves to ‘music companies’ instead of ‘record labels’ (Marshall 83). The renaming signifies a new business system different from the old one in which “one the one hand, because of the advances and low royalty rates, most artists have never received money from their recordings, but the success of their recordings has helped to produce income from other sources; record labels, on the other hand, have been able to overlook these alternative sources of income because they receive the vast majority of profit generated by records.” (Marshall 86). The 360 deals therefore find the music industry at a point where due to the decreasing numbers of record sales they need to tap other sources of revenue. Marshall’s comment is quite poignant:

“In order to avoid accusations of outright greed, the labels need to justify taking income from areas which, in recent memory at last, have been deemed off-limits to them.” (86).

At this point it should be pointed out, as Marshall does not neglect to emphasize, that major labels have and still play a vital role in building artists careers. But as was demonstrated on the example of Amanda Palmer, the affiliation with a major record label is no longer the only way of existing as a popular, “mainstream” artist. However, Palmer’s change of heart came when she already was a popular artist with a solid and loyal fan base. Both Eminem and Jay Z achieved mainstream popularity with the help of a major label, but it will be Macklemore who will answer the question whether an independent starting artist can achieve mainstream popularity.

50

Commercialized authenticity

When Nelson George invited three of the ‘founding fathers’ of hip hop – Africa

Bambataa, Kool DJ Herc and Grandmaster Flash to an interview in 1993 and asked them who ‘owns’ hip hop, they all replied “whites”. Only Africa Bambaataa elaborated on the answer: “The white industry owns it now because they control all the record companies.

And all our people that make money worry about Benz’s and big houses and fly girls instead of being Black entrepreneurs. You need to take the business back.” (54). As was depicted in the previous section, the nature of the corporate music industry went through several changes in the new millennium – if white music industry ‘owns’ hip hop, it profits of the facets of the hip hop culture (such as apparel, merchandize or other art forms besides the live and recorded music) more than ever before due to the introduction of 360 deals.

It is disputable to determine the meaning of Bambaataa’s phrase “take the business back” in relation to the hip hop culture. It could mean the representation of African

Americans in the commercialization of a genre that is historically associated with African

Americans, but that does not correspond to Bambaataa’s critique of the actual profiting black rappers and their focus on materialism. Being a “Black entrepreneur” must surely entail something more which is beneficial not only to the artist himself, but also to the genre and hip hop culture that enabled them to reach commercial success.

The dichotomy between art and profit is very pronounced in the context of rap music and its emphasis on street credibility, as making money is a frequent motive in many rap’s lyrics – Hess’s explanation is that

Because of this emphasis on street smarts, hip hop is hostile to rappers who

came from privileged backgrounds and didn’t have to struggle for their

success. Even the wealthiest hip hop artists have established credibility 51

through rags-to-riches stories of the socioeconomic disadvantage they

experienced during their rise to fame. In telling these rags-to-riches stories,

rappers often juxtapose their childhood poverty with displays of the money

they have made through rap music. (636)

However, rappers do not avoid mentioning the fact that their music is produced thanks to their association with the corporate music industry – the identity of a street-savvy artist must in this case function as a form of resistance against the influence of the record label over the work of the artist. Rappers therefore tend to pose themselves in their lyrics as using their abilities – street smarts – acquired during their formative period of struggling for prosperity and fame, typically associated with the life of the street – emphasizing their occupations of hustlers - pimps, gangsters or drug dealers. Yet these are not always just make-belief – these stylizations are supported by either rumors of immoral practices as means to an end: “Suge Knight is rumored to have used violent threats to coerce Vanilla

Ice into signing over his publishing rights to his hit “Ice, Ice Baby” (1990) and to coerce

Eazy-E into releasing Dr. Dre from his contract with Ruthless Records” (Hess 638-9), or actual examples: “In 1995, Murray was sentenced to a five-year prison term for his assault on show promoters at a Connecticut nightclub. In 1997, Diddy (the highest grossing rapper of 2016] was arrested for assaulting Interscope Records executive Steve Stoute, after he refused to shelve a music video with which Diddy was unhappy.” (638).

However, mostly rappers try to prove in their lyrics their hip hop integrity by stressing their creative freedom and control over their music while getting their records released through the corporate music industry channels – thus the major labels themselves become the instrument which serves the author to make profit and stay an authentic representative of hip hop. Without this creative freedom, the affiliation with a major label for the sake of profit would be considered as selling out (636), which would detach the artist from the

52

core culture of hip hop, as was the case of MC Hammer, one of the propagators of the cross-genre of pop and rap in the early 1990s. His album Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em became one of that year’s best-selling albums. Focusing more on the performance – the style, fashion and choreography rather than lyrical or musical complexity or innovativeness, MC Hammer was criticized by members of the rap community for his incline towards pop – A Tribe Called Quest addressed him in their “Check the Rhime” and proclaimed “Rap is not pop. If you call it that, stop.” (637). Evidently, street credibility is one of the fundamental aspects of rap’s authenticity.

The following sections will introduce Eminem’s opponents for his analysis in the next chapter and will take into consideration their rap authenticity – as was already mentioned, other fundamental elements constitute the form of relation to the core hip hop culture – either a geographical relation, or association with the community (established rappers or live contact with audience) or its tradition. The description of the following artists will also include a mention of their label association and current profits, based on

Forbes’s analysis of their earning between June 2015 to June 2016.

Jay Z

The closest representative of the term “Black entrepreneur” out of this selection of rappers would be Jay Z, at least in term of his commercial endeavors. In the Forbes’ top 20 wealthiest rap artist of the year 2016 Jay Z ‘won’ the second place with his earnings of $53.5 million. Interestingly, “He didn’t play many shows or release a new album during the past 12 months, but continued to cash in on his Roc Nation entertainment company,

Armand de Brignac champagne, D’Ussé cognac and other ventures.” (Cash Kings 2016).

Shawn “Jay Z” Carter was born into Brooklyn family whose father left it when Shawn was twelve. As he admits, before he started rapping, he was dealing drugs (King of Rap) and using these earnings he started with two other associates their own record label, Roc- 53

a-Fella Records, selling his CD’s out of the trunk of his car before he was able to sign a deal with Priority Records, releasing his debut album Reasonable Doubt in 1996.

Since then, Jay Z became one of the best-selling artists of all time. Being born in

Brooklyn and growing up in the Marcy Projects enables him to anchor his identity as a rapper in the birthplace of hip hop, which he acknowledges in his lyrics, most notably in a collaborative song with Alicia Keys “Empire State of Mind” which generated worldwide success, but also throughout his whole discography. His designation as

Bambaataa’s ‘Black entrepreneur’ would be justified by his community ties – Jaz-Z very often collaborates with other rappers in producing songs, searching for new talents or trying to change the conditions in music industry with the introduction of Tidal streaming service owned by artists themselves; but besides professional ties he also financially supports the community where he was born, setting up “programs like “Team Rock” to provide scholarship opportunities and after-school programs for inner-city kids, and his annual Christmas toy drive provides $10.000 in gifts to children in the Marcy Housing

Projects where Jay Z grew up.” (Hess 639). Basically, this successful artist and businessman ‘takes the business back’ while trying to better the conditions of his fellow artists and the community that helped to raise him.

Macklemore

Macklemore, né Ben Haggarty, from the hip hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis is widely considered as a mainstream independent artist, no matter how contradictory this designation may sound. After releasing his first album The Language of My World under his independent record label Macklemore LCC with moderate success, with the help of touring concerts and building his fan base via social media, he and his DJ and producer

Ryan Lewis were able to produce their debut album The Heist on their own without any 54

help of a record label except for the radio promotion from Alternative Distribution

Alliance. When they received four Grammy Awards for this album in 2014, thus marking their mainstream status (their reach and popularity in pop culture and worldwide fame) it was a small miracle in the music industry. The means of managing their music reflect the chief theme of his lyrics – the archetypal American perseverance in pursuing one’s goals which put the duo on the 14th place on the Forbes’ list, grossing $14 million.

Haggarty was born into a well-off white family in Seattle – in his lyrics he openly admits that his upbringing was trouble-free. The subject matter of his early lyrics is dealing mostly with hip hop and his place in it – what is interesting is the rhetoric he uses to justify his role of another white rapper (since Eminem’s first album preceded

Macklemore’s first one by 6 years). Macklemore directly acknowledges the historical white appropriation of rap and African-American cultural forms but simultaneously utilizes the principles of hip hop authenticity – his way of “keeping it real” is rooted exactly in acknowledging the historical co-optation of black cultural forms and current social problems in the USA related to the issues of race – racial profiling, the issue of white privilege or the hypocrisy of the white majority of overlooking these problems. His own narrative persona – Macklemore – is distinctively regionally defined (by paying homage to his city, most notably in “My Oh, My”) and defined in its relation to the core culture (claiming the influence of other rappers such as Wu Tang, graffiti artists such as

Basquiat or directly cooperating on the song “Downtown” with Grandmaster Caz – an old-timer of the early hip hop culture). His own subject matter is made to seem to be almost exclusively derived from his own personal life – whether Macklemore tackles the topic of consumerism and brand ideology in “Wings”, same-sex marriage in “Same

Love”, white supremacy in “White Privilege” and “White Privilege II”, or drug and alcohol abuse in “Otherside”, in each narrative features either Macklemore (or rather Ben

55

Haggardy) as having a direct experience or indirect knowledge of the content matter - having an homosexual uncle in the family or a friend who overdosed. It is as if there was no fictional Macklemore, the distinction between Macklemore and Ben Haggarty is almost nonexistent. Yet these autobiographical narratives are not the endpoints of these problematics – his involvement the two of his most pronounced themes – drugs and racial injustice refer to his actual involvement in raising awareness about the opioid epidemic by starring alongside POTUS Barack Obama in a MTV documentary “Prescription for

Change: Ending America’s Opioid Crisis” and sharing his personal experience of addiction to prescribed drugs, or involvement in the Black Lives Matter activist movement.

In comparison with the main subject of this study, Eminem, Macklemore figures within the hip hop culture as a white commentator of the American society and as a role model for his audience, especially in relation to the question of racial issues. This is an important facet of the racial difference between the black and white rappers – their target audience. From the lyrics of Jay Z and his usage of the word nigga it is clear he addresses only African Americans and thus targets his audience. Since Macklemore was defined as drawing his inspiration from his own life, which makes his narrator a socially conscious, middle-class Caucasian with a history of drug abuse and love for hip hop, in certain aspects his targeted audience may be only white, but it is not limited by the ethnically defining form of address. The first step in ascertaining who is Eminem’s target audience and whether Eminem’s persona is indeed black, as was Homolka’s original claim, is the presentation of the fact that contrary to the general lack of restraints of Eminem’s alter ego Slim Shady, the “n-word is not in [his] vocabulary” (qtd. in Rodman 32). Why is that might help in answering the main question of this analysis.

56

4. The rapper that happens to be white

This last chapter will unify the findings of the previous chapters in relation to

Eminem and analyze the issues of his mainstream status and label affiliation, his narrative personas in relation to his race and the issue of his status in rap music and hip hop culture.

The analysis will serve as elaboration of the arguments which accuse Eminem of cultural appropriation. The initial hypothesis, proposed by Homolka, is following: “[Eminem’s] lyrics do not diverge from mainstream hip-hop production, which proves his status of another “black rapper”, as his tremendous success rests in his white skin and, above all, black persona.” (66).

Marhall Mathers

The man behind the moniker Eminem is Marshall Mathers, born 1972 in Saint

Joseph, Missouri. Little Marshall had a troublesome childhood – after his father left shortly after his birth, he was raised by his mother. Moving from place to place, Marshal used to be frequently bullied even after they finally settled in a black neighborhood of

Detroit. In 1991 when Marshal was only 11, his closest family member and friend who introduced Marshal to hip hop music - his one month older uncle Ronnie - killed himself.

Four years later, his mother adopted a foster daughter Kim, whom Eminem later on fell in love with. All of these relationships had a crucial impact on Marshal’s coming of age and his lyrics. In Detroit Mathers discovered his fascination with rap music and started practicing writing lyrics and rapping. It was his friend Proof, a rapper and a host of the regionally famous open mic contests at the Hip Hop Shop, who encouraged Eminem, a white rapper, to face the racism of a predominantly black audience during these contests to ultimately gain their respect and local renown due to his skills presented onstage.

57

Gradually gaining popularity, he was signed to FBT Productions, run by brothers Jeff and

Mark Bass, owning an indie label Web Entertainment in 1992. (King of Rap). In 1995,

Kim became pregnant and gave birth to their daughter Hailie in December of that year.

One year later, Eminem made his debut album Infinite under the Detroit independent label

Web Entertainment. Unfortunately, the album was not met with positive critical response

– “After the release of Infinite, Eminem’s personal struggles and abuse of drugs and alcohol culminated in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.” (Hornbach). Working for a minimum wage and living with his girlfriend Kim, their daughter and his mother in her trailer home, Mathers found an outlet for his frustration and anger and developed the character called Slim Shady – a violent, vulgar and sadistic alter ego which he started employing in his lyrics. In the year 1997 he recorded his debut EP (extended play record, not considered a full album), The Slim Shady EP in which he first introduced the character of Slim Shady, again under the independent label Web Entertainment. Although the record gained some underground popularity (King of Rap), it was not until the record was noticed by the rapper and producer Dr. Dre (former member of N.W.A) that Eminem’s rap career would have a prospect for worldwide fame.

The rise of Eminem

Dr. Dre was introduced to Eminem’s music by listening to his Slim Shady EP, handed to him by Jimmy Iovine, the CEO of Interscope. After listening to Eminem’s work, Dr. Dre was captivated, not even knowing Eminem was white, or caring when he ultimately found out. (Mathers). Dr. Dre saw a great potential in Eminem and signed him to his record label Aftermath Entertainment in 1998. Together they not only cooperated on the production of songs, which spawned the The Slim Shady LP in 1999 under the distribution of Interscope Records - Dr. Dre went out of his way in the music production to match the music to Eminem’s lyrics and their delivery (Mathers). What started as a 58

business relationship soon became a friendly collaboration projected into the song narratives - Dr. Dre would also participate in rapping on The Slim Shady LP. On “Guilty

Conscience” where Slim Shady plays the part of the bad, devil’s part of one’s conscience while Dre stands for the angelic, good and moral part, Slim reminds Dr. Dre of his past - being a member of the gangsta rap group N.W.A: “Mr. Dre, Mr. N.W.A, Mr. AK /

Coming straight outta Compton, y'all better make way / How in the fuck you gonna tell this man not to be violent?” (Eminem). This rhetoric, as well as the association with an established black rapper has several implications. First, it portrays the nature of Slim

Shady – his opinions are uttered point-blank, no matter the consequence, moral and social conventions. Second, his unconventional and immoral stances are supported by pointing out the hypocrisy of their critics. And lastly, the presence of Dr. Dre in the songs and music videos, expressing Dre’s support, partly bestowed on Eminem the much-needed hip hop authenticity that he, as a white rapper, needed to be accepted by the black audience. Eminem carefully acknowledges this relationship in the music video of his song

“Without Me” from his The Eminem Show album from the year 2002 in which he literally adopted the role of Robin to the Batman of Dr. Dre. Their relationship can be therefore defined, at least in the beginning of Eminem’s mainstream carrier, as Dr. Dre being a mentor to the young and aspiring white rapper who found himself under the patronage of a black and established rapper and producer. But this relationship did not release Eminem from his Detroit associations – after the immense success of his mainstream-approaching album The Slim Shady LP, Eminem founded together with his lawyer Paul Rosenberg their own record label, Shady Records, which resulted in Mathers owning all the rights to his music and lyrics in conjunction with Aftermath Entertainment (Mathers).

Eminem was introduced to Paul Rosenberg by his childhood friend Proof. After seeing him perform and listening to his album Infinite, Rosenberg became Eminem’s

59

lawyer and later on, a marketing manager. Knowing that Eminem’s albums would stir controversy, the affiliation with Interscope and their roster of rappers such as Dr. Dre or

Snoop Dogg who have been associated with the gangsta rap controversy seemed only logical to Eminem and his manager (King of Hip Hop). However, Shady Records were not only for the needs of Eminem. He used his mainstream influence and his role as the president of Shady Records to promote and produce the album Devil’s Night in 2001 of the Detroit rap group D12 (read ‘Dirty Dozen’), as he was one of its members since the early 1990s. Besides his affiliation with the rappers from his past, Shady Record sought new and promising talents – among the most successful ones that Shady Records signed were Obie Trice, or 50 Cent, who credits Eminem with support in a similar manner

Eminem acknowledges the mentorship of Dr. Dre. This suggest a solidarity among the rappers of not only regional background, but also an allegiance to hip hop community that transgresses regional boundaries, as 50 Cent is a New York-based rapper.

Yet besides his support of other rappers through his own channel, Eminem’s own record label in conjunction with a distributional network of Interscope Records rids him of the problem of limited creative control over his own music. A very prominent feature of his production is the controversy of his lyrics, which he was able to preserve in spite of the association with a major record company. In one of the interviews feature in the documentary Not Afraid: The Shady Records Story, Mathers shares what he values in his own lyrics as well as in the lyrics of potential rappers to offer a recording deal:

Back when we used to do open mics and shit like that, you only had one

shot to get a reaction out of this crowd. And to be able to even have an

opportunity for someone to wanna hand you the mic again next week, that

was a survival mode […] our whole brand was built on speaking our mind

and let’s sign emcees and try to get rappers on a label that can spit but also

60

perk ears up saying things that maybe the next rapper might not say.

(Mathers)

The employment of controversial content matter is a prominent requirement of Eminem’s music production. The utterances of his narrators, especially the rapped by the persona of

Slim Shady, seem to have no moral boundaries – violence and hatred towards women, homosexuals, or the author’s own family, as well as provocative social and political content are a common feature of Eminem’s lyrics. Yet these topics, if they are a marketing strategy or a reflection of American society, beg a peculiar question in terms of narrative theory – the relationship between the author and his narrative personas.

Authenticity vs. fiction

As for the disturbing lyrical content, Monika Fludernik offers an explanation from the point of narrative theory: “As we know from conversational narrative, stories need to have reportability, they need to provide an interest, some news, something that thrills or excites the audience. […] It is therefore only logical that narrative mostly deals with the unfamiliar, the long ago, the far away; or with the dangerous, the secret, and the prohibited.” (Fludernik 264). Fludernik’s theory could explain the fascination of white audience with the African-American experience behind the lyrics of rap songs, as well as the immoral subject matter of Eminem’s songs. Yet this fascination is also associated with the influence of such narratives – Fludernik also mentions that imaginative writing has always been accused of lying – of its fictionality which might morally corrupt its reader (or listener), separate them from reality and thus mediate a distorted view of reality and have a negative influence on the reader or listener. The only resolve is in the understanding of the cultural conventions which allow certain genres their fictionality and their authors their creative freedom. The crux of the matter, in the context of rap music, 61

is that the conventions of the rap music genre require a certain level of authenticity while simultaneously allowing the author their creative freedom and thus fictional nature of their work.

Tricia Rose describes the relationship between the author and the narrator: “Rap lyrics are closely linked with the author; unlike traditional Western notions of composition in which the composer’s text is in a separate sphere from that of the performer, rap lyrics are the voice of the composer and the performer.” (Rose 124). Given the tradition of the rap genre, the distinction between the author – Marshal Mathers and his character Slim Shady is very blurred. For example, in “97’ Bonnie and Clyde” when the narrator killed the author’s wife Kim and together with their baby daughter they are riding to the beach to throw mommy’s body into the ocean, the whole narrative is a monologue of the narrator in the form of baby talk directed at the baby of Kim, the authors’ real world wife, whom the narrator murdered. The power of the narrative is in the content form of the song – not what freighting topic or story is presented, but the method that is used to convey it – the combination of hate that killed the mother in contrast to the love the father feels to the baby who is oblivious to the situation even though the dead body is right in front of her. Because of the monologue and the first person narrative, it is impossible to determine the identity of the narrator – is it the author, or his fictive persona Eminem, or his evil alter ego, Slim Shady?

Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” argued for the separation of the author (his biographical details, beliefs or convictions) from their text – the text should therefore be interpreted on its own – the reader should not approach it with any prior assumptions or preconceived ideas so as not to limit its interpretation and their understanding. But in the context of rap music, this is very hard to do, as traditionally, the genre does not set clear boundaries between the author and the narrator. Even though rap

62

is still a performance that could be compared to acting, the role of a rapper and a movie or theater actor is different – as rap requires some level of authenticity of the actor (he plays a role that is more or less consistent, as it is derived from his own life and therefore should be believable and relatable to the audience), his role cannot be substantially changed once it is established – that would entail losing the authenticity of the rapper. In contrast to classical acting, an actor can switch roles and still be believable in his performance. The best a rapper can hope for is therefore to become a typecast of his own genre. Krims assigns this aspect of authenticity of the rapper’s identity to the genre of gangsta rap: “[…] one of the principal authenticating strategies of early gangsta rap has precisely been the symbolic collapsing of the MC onto the artist – the projection that the

MC himself […] is the persona – a voice from the “streets,” speaking from authentic experience” (95). As he further adds, this identification of the author with his narrative persona is analogous to the mantra of rap authenticity: “keep it real”. Krims also makes a point that once a rapper turns away from an established persona, this ‘performance’ might haunt his career in a similar way an actor’s performances might be compared to his best, Oscar-awarded role. This established, outstanding role then becomes a yardstick of any other role.

What Fludernik means by ‘reportability’ is the fundamental aspect of narrative – a work of art should ideally strike a responsive chord in its audience by reporting something which the audience can relate to, identify themselves with, or to reflect some aspect of human existence and experience that would enrich the reader’s or listener’s understanding of reality or themselves. In this meaning, I will instead employ the term relatability. The central argument of Homolka’s accusation of Eminem’s lyrics is that he adopts a black narrative persona as a means of appropriation of the black cultural expressive forms. It would be only logical to do this once one would decide to break into

63

somebody else’s musical genre – when in rap, do as the rappers do. However, as was evident from the example of Vanilla Ice who lied about his autobiographical background, thus severing the ties to his street identity and core hip hop culture and ending his career, or MC Hammer who tried to use the rap genre as a means of aiming for the mainstream pop music field and ended up discredited by his colleagues and fans, not possessing the necessary level of hip hop authenticity equals losing one’s hip hop career. The same would hold true for a Caucasian pretending to be an authentic black rapper by adopting the style, speech, or narrative forms of black rappers.

Persona

The initial claim was that “[Eminem’s] lyrics do not diverge from mainstream hip- hop production” (Homolka, 66). Homolka probably meant that since Eminem participates in the rhetoric of the Dozens (verbally degrading his opponents and building up his own reputation in opposition to other rappers), his lyrics can be likened to the typical topics of mainstream rap songs. However, it is in fact his lyrics and their delivery what differentiates Eminem from other rappers. Even though he spent a significant part of his childhood and early adulthood in the ghetto and his rise to fame is a typical example of the rags-to-riches story, Eminem does not flaunt his fortune and status in the way typical to the ‘black entrepreneurs’. These rappers put their former poverty in contrast to the money they made through rap music, validating thus their “struggle for success” (Hess

635). On his debut album Reasonable Doubt (1996) Jay Z depicts his rise to rap fame by following the occupation of a hustler. Here is an example of its language coded through

Signifyin(g) rhetorical devices:

Live out my dreams until my heart give out

Involved with cream, you know exactly what this shit's about 64

Fuck y'all mean? Handling since a teen, I dish out

Like the point guard off your favorite team, without doubt

Using “Cream,” a slang term for money, the narrator indirectly describes selling drugs – the role of a dealer is introduced by employing the basketball metaphor – point guard is a similar role as the quarterback in American football – responsible for tactically passing the ball. The narrator here is handling drugs and “dishing [them] out” – distributing them among his clientele. The concept of the whole album is based on this character of a drug dealer, or rather a hustler. Later on in this album, Jay Z describes in his song “Can I Live” the reasons why his narrator sells drugs:

Well, we hustle out of a sense of hopelessness, sort of a desperation

Through that desperation, we become addicted

Sort of like the fiends we accustomed to serving

But we feel we have nothing to lose, so we offer you, well

We offer our lives, right, what do you bring to the table?

The hustler is likened to the drug addict – the need to escape poverty is similar to the craving for a drug the addict feels. Jay Z is here Signifyin(g) on the socioeconomic background of his narrator – the metaphor likening the drug use craving to the hustler’s need of escaping poverty explains his profession. For the hustler, money is what drug is to the addicted – since he feels he has “nothing to lose”, except for his life (being imprisoned or killed), which does not make much difference in comparison to poverty, in the end the hustler’s occupation is explained, excused, and even rather romanticized.

Even though Eminem’s style in many aspects stems out of gangsta rap, his personas are not derived from the hustler or gangster character. Instead, the foundation of

Eminem’s rap identity is rooted in a very distinct American socioeconomic group – the lower working class, known in popular culture by the derogatory racial slur “white trash”

65

– he even calls himself “The White Trash God” in the lyrics of “Rap God” on his 2013 album The Marshall Mathers LP 2. But mainly in the earliest albums, Eminem tackles the poverty, hopelessness and striving for a better life (most notably on The Slim Shady

LP in “If I Had” and “Brain Damage”) under the layers of violent and sexist, but also sarcastic and humorous fantasies - yet these are played out on a screen of his own personal narrative.

Even though his hip hop authenticity is tied to the ghetto where he was growing up and where he ‘made it’ as a white rapper, the authenticity of his characters is related to his personal life, especially the uneasy and problematic relationship with his mother and his wife Kim. This has been an ongoing storyline in his lyrics since his debut album; one which transcends the boundaries of his lyrics as he was sued by both these women, mostly for defamation (Burgess). This topic – being an underprivileged, abused and bullied kid with unstable relationships that turns into the evil, violent and nonconformist

Slim Shady is probably the most relatable thing for Eminem’s audience. This transformation from an underdog into a dominant, yet self-deprecating brute is a mere approximation of Signifyin(g), as this is not an indirect form of communication, quite the other way around, Eminem’s alter ego is saying directly what the author could not say in public. From the position of the author this is an indirect form of communication with the audience, but the difference between Eminem’s alter ego unleashing all the pent up anger, aggression and prejudice and the Signifyin(g) Monkey is that Eminem does not need to assign new meaning to an already established system of communication, he does not need to code his language in order not to be understood by a specific party. Basically,

Eminem’s Signifyin(g) consists of indirect rhetorical devices, but these rhetorical strategies have a different function then the ones employed by Jay Z. Jay Z’s character directs his utterance to specific audience – the African Americans identifying with the

66

collective identity expressed by the address nigga – and therefore encodes his lyrics in relation to a shared experience or shared knowledge of his listeners. Eminem rather follows the Western tradition of satire, heavy sarcasm and wild and complex troping. In the song “My Name Is” from his debut album The Slim Shady LP, the song serves as his own introduction in which he portrays himself as psychologically affected by his upbringing:

I lay awake and strap myself in the bed

With a bulletproof vest on and shoot myself in the head

I'm steaming mad

And by the way, when you see my dad?

Tell him that I slit his throat, in this dream I had

As was remarked about the principle of Signifyin(g), the merit is not in the content, rather, it is the art of figuration, the artistic dexterity that is valued the most. The rhyming couplets together with the complex and logically unexpected figuration (bulletproof vest versus a headshot) are the reasons for which Eminem became an esteemed lyricist.

His narrators also frequently step out of their role to acknowledge that the fiction of the author’s work is indeed fiction and not the subjective reality of the author, as in the song from Marshall Mathers LP album, called “Stan” after the main protagonist of the song, a fan so obsessed with Eminem as portrayed in his lyrics, that he ultimately carries out one of the Slim Shady’s fantasies and kills his pregnant girlfriend. Eminem, as the author replying to a letter from his fan, admits that his work is not realistic, that he does not actually cut himself or does the things he raps about: “But what's this shit you said about you like to cut your wrists too? / I say that shit just clowning, dawg / Come on, how fucked up is you?” In other instances, Eminem uses overt sarcasm and irony to point to the fictionality of his work and the impact it might have on people who take his lyrics

67

literally. In the song “Role Model” from The Slim Shady LP he raps: “Follow me and do exactly what the song says / Smoke weed, take pills, drop out of school, kill people / And drink, jump behind the wheel like it was still legal”. This obvious irony, Signifyin(g) on the influence mainstream artist have on their young audience, is only one of the signs of the ethical stance of the actual real-world author.

Double-sided persona

The popularity of Eminem’s work also lies in the indeterminacy of the speaker. In the example above, it is not clear whether the narrator is Slim Shady, the fictitious character with a license to kill, so to say, or Eminem, or Marshall Mathers, since the first person narrative does not name its narrator and features real-world characters – the wife and daughter of the author. Furthermore, Eminem sometimes employs metafiction by referring to the process of narration as Marshall Mathers, and thus breaks the continuity of the fictionality of the narrative. On top of that, after the years of indeterminacy, at the very end of the latest album, Marshall Mather’s II in “Evil Twin”, he admits that:

But all bullshit aside, I hit a stride

Still Shady inside, hair every bit as dyed

As it used to be when I first introduced y'all to my skittish side

And blamed it on him when they tried to criticize

Cause we are the same, bitch

Still, even after this confession the indeterminacy persists – the first reading would mean that the real-world author admits that the words of his ‘evil twin’ were in fact his – that he felt the hatred, desires and urges which were taken as figurative. On the other hand, the line “we are the same” might still be uttered by Eminem – another fictitious character, not the real-world author. This indeterminacy and the impossibility of exact interpretation 68

are the traits of a trickster, namely the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara whose function, in Gates’ account, is the indeterminacy of interpretation (35). Since Esu-

Elegbara’s American variant is the trickster figure of Signifyin(g) Monkey, Eminem is, ironically, in this aspect closer to the African tradition that was preserved in the cultural memory of the first African Americans than many black rappers. Interestingly,

Homolka’s claim about Eminem being a white rapper with a black persona might entail the same indeterminacy – since Eminem grew up in a ghetto and was part of a black community whose respect he ultimately won as a rapper, what meaning do the adjectives black or white actually have? To discuss the questions in relation to the issue of cultural appropriation, let’s start with Eminem’s participation in rap music. As was argued in the first chapter, Signifyin(g) plays a role in both the sonic and the textual elements of

African-American music. The influence of the African sound ideal on the African-

American music and musicality further developed by Signifyin(g) revision produced a number of musical styles and genres that were clearly developed from the black (African- derived) and African-American musical tradition. This musical growth, combined with the socioeconomic conditions and use of technology gave rise to rap music, which

Eminem merely joined. In terms of rap music, its traits and principles, it could be therefore put forward that Eminem adopted this cultural form associated with African Americans.

One might also admit that Eminem adopted the rhetorical strategies derived from

Signifyin(g), as they are a fundamental principle of the textuality of rap lyrics, and therefore a part of the genre that Eminem joined. My findings, based on the requirement of authenticity of hip hop identity, lead me to believe that this is where the similarities between Eminem and other black mainstream rappers, their personas or lyrics, end.

Eminem managed to establish a geographically defined identity and created personas that were far removed from any other black, or any other personas. Their very distinctive

69

‘white trash’ portrayal, further personified by the experiences from Mathers’ personal life and enhanced with his creativity, unequivocally cannot be associated with any ‘black persona.’ Moreover, Eminem earned his place within the hip hop community by the employment of his skills – be it lyrical and narrative dexterity, hip hop integrity

(associations with other rappers and his Detroit community) and marketing and production strategies. If his employment of controversial topics is a marketing strategy or an artistic intention is not really the relevant question here. The final question left to be answered is his status of a white rapper positioned within a musical genre that is predominantly associated with African Americans.

Eminem’s narrative tactic, or marketing strategy, is rooted in ascribing the controversial content (gay bashing, misogyny, threats bordering on hate speech and others) to his alter ego – the character of Slim Shady. Even though it would seem nothing is sacred to this character, there are two areas which are off-limits to this supposedly omnipotent narrator. The first one is his daughter Hailie – as was mentioned in reference to the song “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” from The Slim Shady LP, or is also evident in the gruesome song of love gone sour “Kim” from The Marshall Mathers LP, which allegedly made the real-world Kim attempt suicide, Hailie is always treated in these narratives with the utmost love and devotion from the narrator. It certainly offers an insight into the ethical frame of Eminem’s lyrics, either Signifyin(g) on Mathers’ parents or parents in general. But supposing the narrator in these narratives is Slim Shady, as these two songs are set up on the dichotomy of love and hate, ending up in murder of the mother, this exposes Slim Shady as an unreliable narrator. Since he is portrayed as an evil alter ego, the devotion to Hailie somewhat disrupts the role of this character. Since Slim does not stop short from almost any form of murder, torture, violence towards women and family members, drug abuse or gay bashing, all the topics that might be considered to reflect the

70

evil nature of American society, the fact that Slim steers clear from manifestations of racism towards African Americans is a very marked omission. In fact, the n-word is never used in Eminem’s or Slim’s lyrics.

It is possible that Eminem avoids the n-word in order not to destroy his hip-hop integrity, that he does it out of respect or commercial caution. What is certain is that he seems very much aware of his status, which, after the immense success and profits from his albums, might be viewed by some as associated with cultural appropriation. Eminem’s strategy is actually very simple, or rather elegant – he actually acknowledges these accusations and thus neutralizes them. This strategy – acknowledging something which might be potentially used against him rather than denying it or ignoring it, curiously works. The reason might be in the fact that this admission is again expressed in his lyrics, therefore it cannot be credited to the real-world author. But if one assigns this admission from the song “Without Me” feature on his 2002 album The Eminem Show to Marshal

Mathers himself:

I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley

To do black music so selfishly

And use it to get myself wealthy

There's a concept that works

Twenty million other white rappers emerge what might be at play here is actually not an admission of cultural co-optation, but rather a promotion of the musical genre. Since Eminem gained his hip hop authenticity, earned his success and tries to support other rap artists on their way to fame, if they have what it takes, this may hardly be termed a cultural appropriation. At least not in the sense of exploitation of the culture in question. Rodman talks in relation to Eminem’s status about a case of cultural borrowing

71

where the borrowing that takes place is recognizably more about love than

theft: where whites take up black styles, forms, and/or genres, not to claim

them as their own nor to transform them into something “universal” (and

thus something dehistoricized, decontextualized, and deracinated), but in

ways that suggest genuine respect for—and even deference toward—black

culture. (19)

The truth is that before Eminem entered the American mainstream culture, his white skin was probably not an advantage in the predominantly black Detroit neighborhood or on the stage in front of a black audience. Eminem’s music was not a prefabricated product, but his own work that was molded by principles of the rap genre and the author himself.

From the literary perspective, Eminem’s race does not play any significant part in the literary process, as his lyrics stem from his life, inspiration and creativity. The color of his skin certainly played a role for the white audience in the marketing of his music, but not in the sense of a crossover, associated with cultural appropriation – even though the form of Eminem’s music is rooted in the traits of the rap genre, associated with African-

American musical tradition, the content matter is distinctly derived from Eminem’s personal life and identity. These findings lead me to believe that the accusation of cultural appropriation is inappropriate – rather, Eminem’s accomplishments – his rise to fame while maintaining his community ties and supporting new rappers expand and enrich the rap music and demolish the barriers classifying rap music by race, which has been the status quo in mainstream rap music before the advent of the controversial, but skillful and authentic rapper that happens to be white.

72

5. Conclusion

The objective of this thesis was to put the white rapper Eminem into a larger context of African-American, or black music to answer the question if his musical production and his status in rap music can be rightfully considered as a form of cultural appropriation.

The first priority was to determine if rap music is indeed a musical form which stems from the African-American music and experience. The roots of African-American music and musicality were traced in the first chapter, exploring the lasting influence of

African sound ideal on African-American music and its development. The theory of

Signifying was identified as the underlying creative principle of both the textual and sonic element of African-American music and the development of musical genres. Through

Signifyin(g), a relation was established between the earliest African-American cultural practices and rap textuality, whereas the commercialization of African-American music was explored in terms of its effects on the authors themselves and the African-American minority and their social status. A brief description of the origins of rap music and hip hop culture was mentioned to characterize the main principles of rap music and the hip hop community, which has lasting influence on rapper’s identity and its authenticity. The topic of commercialization of African-American music was reintroduced with a focus on the change of marketing strategies of the music industry and the contemporary opportunities of artists and their participation in forms of production which is no longer limited to art.

Rap music was briefly described as a form of entrepreneurship with its implications for the lyrics and personas of the narrators considered. Macklemore’s role and way of negotiating his status as a white rapper were put into contrast with Eminem’s approach and narrative principles, which introduced the issue of the differentiation of the 73

real-word author and his narrative characters. The indeterminacy of Eminem’s narrators was identified as a distinctive feature of Eminem’s lyrics. These were further compared to lyrics and mode of narration employed by Jay Z. By this comparison, Eminem’s lyrics were identified as being derived from a distinctive and original identity and experience of the author in question. Homolka’s initial claim about Eminem’s black persona was therefore proven as false, which, however, did not dispute the accusation of cultural appropriation in relation to the profitability of Eminem’s profession. The accusation of cultural appropriation was reframed as an expansion and enrichment of the rap genre due to Eminem’s hip hop integrity and prowess as a rapper, not a category of race.

74

Works Cited

“B-Rabbit Vs. Lotto.” Genius. 7.10.2016. genius.com/Eminem-b-rabbit-vs-lotto-lyrics.

“Eminem: King of Hip Hop.” Directed by Maureen Goldthorpe, EntertainMe UK, 2012.

“Pressing and Distribution Deal.” TAXI. Taxi A&R, 1999. The Musician's Business

Dictionary. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.

“Record Company.” All You Need to Know About Music Business. New York: Free Press,

2006. The Musician's Business Dictionary. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.

8 Mile. Directed by Curtis Hanson, performances by Marshall Mathers, Kim Basinger,

Universal Pictures, 2002.

Anderson, Tim J. Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy. Routledge, NY: 2014. .

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image / Music / Text. Trans. NY: Hill and

Wang, 1977. 142-7.

Billyjam. “Hip-Hop History Tuesdays: DJ Flash & Captain Rapp Look Back and Discuss

New "Westcoastin".” Amoeblog. Amoeba. 5 Nov. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2016.

Blackalicious. “Blackalicious - Alphabet Aerobics (Live).” Online video clip. Youtube.

Youtube, 3 Jul. 2011. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.

Burgess, Myrna. “An Abridged History Of People Suing Eminem.” The Source. L.

Londell McMillan, 7 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.

Candelaria, Lorenzo, and Daniel Kingman. American Music A Panorama. Boston:

Shirmer, 2012.

Caulfield, Keith. “Beastie Boys Blazed Billboard Chart History.” Bilboard. 5 Apr. 2012.

Web. 13 Mar. 2016.

Chimezie, Amuzie. “The Dozens: An African-heritage Theory”. Journal of Black Studies

6.4 (1976): 401–420.

Dee, Kool Moe. “How Ya Like Me Now.” How Ya Like Me Now, RCA Records, 1987. 75

Edwards, Paul. How to Rap: The Art & Science of the Hip-Hop MC. Chicago: Chicago

Review, 2009.

Eminem. “Guilty Conscience.” The Slim Shady LP. Interscope Records, 1998.

Eminem. “Without Me.” The Eminem Show. Interscope Records, 2002.

Fallon, Jimmy, and Justin Timberlake. “History of Rap 6 (Jimmy Fallon & Justin

Timberlake).” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 9 Sept. 2015. Web. 23 Jan.

2016.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Fludernik, Monika. “Identity/alterity.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited

by David Herman, Cambridge UP, 2007. 260-73.

Ford, Robert Jr. “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx.” Billboard Jan. 1978: 65. Web.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary

Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

George, Nelson. Hip Hop America. Centaur, Penguin, 2005. glacial23. “Sir Mix-a-Lot Baby Got Back Channel One Technicolor.” WhoSampled.

WhoSampled.com, n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2016.

Greenburg, Zack O’Malley. “Amanda Palmer Uncut: The Kickstarter Queen On Spotify,

Patreon And Taylor Swift.” Forbes. Forbes Media.16 Apr. 2015. Web. 15 Apr.

2016.

Greenburg, Zack O’Malley. “Revenge Of The Record Labels: How The Majors Renewed

Their Grip On Music.” Forbes. Forbes Media. 4 May 2015. Web. 16 Apr. 2016

Haggarty, Ben. Prescription for Change: Ending America’s Opioid Crisis. Produced by

Craig and Amelia D’Entrone, MTV Development, 2016.

Hess, Mickey. “The Rap Career.” That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, edited

by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, Routledge, 2012, 634-54.

76

Homolka, Petr. “Black or White?: Commercial Rap Music and Authenticity.” Master’s

thesis, Masaryk University, 2010.

Hornbach, Jean-Pierre. Eminem The King of Hip Hop. Lulu.com.

Jacobs, Andrew T.. "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4

(2002). Web. 15. Nov. 2016. www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php.

Jay Z and Alicia Keys. “Empire State of Mind.” Blueprint 3, Roc Nation, 2009.

Jay Z. “Can I Live.” Reasonable Doubt, Priority Records. 1996.

Jay Z. “If I Should Die.” Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life, Roc-A-Fella Records, 1998.

Johnson, Christopher K. “Danceable Capitalism: Hip-Hop’s Link to Corporate Space.”

The Journal of Pan African Studies 2:4 (2008). Web. 12 Mar. 2016.

Knab, Christopher. “How and Why Major Labels and Independent Labels Work

Together.” Music Biz. Academy. Midnight Rain. Mar. 2004. Web. 15 Apr. 2016.

Krims, Adam. Rap music and the poetics of identity. UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Lee, Stephen. “Re-examining the concept of the ‘independent’ record company: the case

of Wax Trax! records.” Popular Music 14:1 (1995): 13-31. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.

Macklemore, and Ryan Lewis, The Heist. Macklemore LCC, 2012.

Macklemore, The Language of My World. Macklemore LCC, 2005.

Marshall, Lee. “The 360 deal and the ‘new’ music industry.” European Journal of

Cultural Studies 16:1 (2012): 77-99. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

Mathers, Marshall. “Not Afraid: The Shady Records Story.” Complex, Compex Media,

5. Mar, 2015. www.ca.complex.com/music/2015/03/eminem-not-afraid-the-

shady-records-story-documentary.

N.W.A. “Straight Outta Compton.” Straing Outta Compton, Ruthless Records, 1988.

77

Nelson, George. “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth.” That’s the Joint! The

Hip-Hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal,

Routledge, 2012, 44-55.

Radcliffe, Daniel. “Daniel Radcliffe Raps Blackalicious' "Alphabet Aerobics."” Online

video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

Rodman, Gilbert B. “Race … and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural

Politics of Authenticity.” Eminem and Rap, Poetry, Race Essays, edited by Scott

F. Park, McFarland, 2014.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. NY: Norton, 1997.

Speckled Red. The Dirty Dozen. Brunswick, 1929.

Wald, Elijah. “Before There Was Rap, There Were The ‘Dozens.’” Radio Boston, 21

Aug. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.

Woldu, Gail Hilson. “Contextualizing Rap: A Brief History of African American Music.”

Rap and Hip Hop: Examining Pop Culture, edited by Jared Green. MI:

Greenhaven, 2003. 25-35.

78