For the life of me I can't understand your reverence for marshall mathers, Vince. I've listened to as much as I can stomach of him, but I find very little entertaining, insightful or redeeeming about his act.
I'm a life-long member of the black community and *I'm* not down with this guy, nor are most of my black friends. In fact, I abhor his brand of misogynistic, homophobic vapidity. Your generalization about what the black community "respects" is a grievous oversimplification, in my opinion. And it's not that I don't like rap...give me De La Soul, Gil Scott Heron, KRS-One, Mos Def, Kweli, Black Thought, Aceyalone, Mystikal or even Common...all infinitely more gifted than Mathers. What other rap artists are you spinning? Is the white rapper the only one you can identify with? Are you suggesting that this guy somehow embodies the genre? I think not. > And that is why Chris Rock has commented that the apocalypse is upon us because the >world's best golfer (Tiger > > Woods) is black and the world's best rapper(Em) is >white. Them's just jokes, Vince! Undoubtedly Mathers is the most commercially successful rap-doer at present, but let's not confuse cd sales figures with artistic gifted-ness. That would be like comparing Kenny G to Coltrane, if you'll excuse a jazz allusion. Even Mathers has said in one of his songs that "I am the worse thing since Elvis Presley/To do black music so selfishly/and use it to get myself wealthy." The man is fronting - simply appropriating a black music form, self-indulgently adding a psychotic spin and regurgitating his white-washed versions to the masses. A travesty as old as original African-American art forms themselves. > By the way, one of the really neat things about 8 Mile is how whites and blacks >interact. In the rap world, it >is a whole differenmt way than in society as a >whole. As far as race relations goes, rappers have it all over >the rest of us. You know what? I could make a movie wherein the lamb lies down with the lion, the eagle flies with the dove and the ebony keys perform in a harmonizing, arm-in-arm chorus line with the ivory ones, but that doesn't make it gospel. Your contention that rap music is some kind of bastion of racial tolerance is nothing short of delusional. Movies are manipulation. >It helped of course that Dr Dre was Em's producer and this was another verification >of Em's "street cred", street >credibility, that he was real and not a white kid slumming. Having Dr. Dre's >approval is the ultimate stamp of what is real. And of course Em being Em, he makes >ample referenceto these facts in his song "White America." Have you stopped to think that Dr. Dre might be about the money rather than credibility? That he might see it as poetic justice that he's making a fortune off Mathers just as Clive Davis is making a mint off Alicia Keys and white "producers" have from made fortunes off the artistry of black musicians for centuries? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that whites buy rap in much larger proportions than blacks and that a white rap act would reap huge sales in the white community. Let's keep it real here. -Julius
