Reading and writing about Chris Brown, the undeniably talented singer who in 2009 become notorious for battering his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, has been, for the last four years, a depressing experience. Whether Brown’s been tossing chairs out of television studio windows, screaming at parking lot attendants, getting a tattoo of either a battered woman or a Dia De Los Muertos figure—who at the end of the day, is still a dead woman—on his neck, or reuniting with Rihanna, he’s been a figure of profound discomfort. Whether his behavior is the response to living through the domestic abuse his mother experienced when he was a teenager, a symptom of more wide-spread issues with anger and self-control, or a result of enormous entitlement, it’s awful to watch anyone behave so self-destructively, and do so much damage to other people in public. And whether Brown has been more of a target, or whether he’s been afforded more or fewer excuses for his behavior and chances to continue working than a white celebrity with a record of violence against women like Charlie Sheen, there’s no denying that his continued presence on Emmy stages and morning talk shows is a vertiginous exercise in trying to parse how much a liability the industry thinks domestic violence and a record of fights are, and how much the market believes that Brown is repentant or that his reunion with Rihanna has absolved him.

The latest intersection of Brown’s character rehabilitation and his need to keep selling records came yesterday morning when he appeared on the Today show to promote his latest single, “Fine China.” In response to questioning from Matt Lauer, about how he’s changed, Brown said that “Most importantly, you know, knowing that what I did was totally wrong, and having to kind of deal with myself and forgive myself in the same breath, and being able to apologize to Rihanna, and being able to be that man that can be a man, you know?” I don’t really know what that means, or what it means for an overall view of gender relations for someone to believe that battering an intimate partner is wrong, but that, as Brown recently said at a comedy club “You gotta say that one thing to her… don’t make me have to tell you again, that’s my p—y, baby! so you better not give it away!…So every person in this motherf–king building, if you got a bad b—h you better say that s–t to her, or she might f–k another n—a.”

But this juxtaposition, and the strange spectacle of people going on talk shows to tout their self-improvement in service of record sales, got me thinking about what it is that we want from celebrities who do terrible things but to continue to want our dollars as consumers. Do we want them to apologize to the people they’ve harmed directly, and to promise to do it never again? Brown seems to have that box checked with Rihanna, but the reaction to their reunion has illustrated how little most people know about how frequently survivors of domestic violence return to the people who abused them. And the fact that he’s reconciled with Rihanna doesn’t seem to have stopped Brown to getting into confrontations that sometimes turn violent with everyone from fellow singers like Frank Ocean to service workers like a parking attendant he unloaded on recently. That disjunct raises interesting questions about why we treat some forms of violence by wealthy and famous men as inexcusable and as a sign that they’re deeply troubled, while others get treated like they’re routine, even when they seem like contributing evidence that someone has a pattern of behavior that’s broadly troubling. Maybe it’s condescending, but I’d like to see Chris Brown stop getting into situations that get violent for his sake, for the sake of the people he gets angry at, and for what he could contribute to the larger conversation if he got religion on a deeper level than the need to retain the ability to sell records.
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With the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in the case against California’s Proposition 8 yesterday, the consensus seems to be that deadline for politicians to come out in support of equal marriage rights and to get some sort of credit for it has passed. But beyond the field on which legal equality is adjudicated, stands for equality can still be interesting. And there’s something particularly telling about this Interview magazine conversation between rapper A$AP Rocky and Alexander Wang in which Rocky both speaks up for gay rights and outlines an important tipping point. He believes it’s now worse for hip-hop’s overall brand to appear homophobic than it once was for rappers to be perceived as gay-friendly:

So now that I’m here and I’ve got a microphone in my hand and about 6,000 people watching me, I need to tell them how I feel. For instance, one big issue in hip-hop is the gay thing. It’s 2013, and it’s a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It’s crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip-hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip-hop is small-minded or stupid—and that’s not the case. We’ve got people like Jay-Z. We’ve got people like Kanye. We’ve got people like me. We’re all prime examples of people who don’t think like that. I treat everybody equal, and so I want to be sure that my listeners and my followers do the same if they’re gonna represent me. And if I’m gonna represent them, then I also want to do it in a good way.

It’s preferable for people to be affirmatively welcoming because they truly want their lives to be full of different kinds of people and want the communities around them to be the same way. But even if they’re not, it’s one of the great victories of the gay rights movement to make an embrace of gay rights better for business than the alternative, both by articulating the size of the gay market itself, and by expanding that figure by adding in the market of straight allies, such that that combined buying power dwarfs that of anti-gay boycotters.

The full recognition of gay humanity and gay purchasing power for a wide range of products go hand-in-hand. Once you recognize that gay people are people who deserve rights, you will probably realize that gay folks are also not a monolithic block who listen only to house music, live only in New York and San Francisco, vacation only on Fire Island, and amuse themselves only with faaaabulous clothes. Like heterosexual people, it turns out that gay people live everywhere. They buy tickets to sporting events—and at those sporting events, buy beer, and hot dogs, and jerseys. They take out mortgages in places other than Chelsea, often for homes that require things like drywall, and gardening prodcuts. And they buy hip-hop records and hip-hop singles and tickets to hip-hop shows. There’s a more attractive order in which to recognize these things, and it’s the one that recognizes the diversity of the gay community first and its purchasing power second. But you can’t recognize one without being confronted with the other. Hip-hop may be slower than Home Depot to shift its brand. But it will be a relief when no homo, a phrase as lyrically lazy as it is intellectually cowardly, becomes an anachronism.

I wouldn’t say I exactly feel sorry for Rush Limbaugh, but it’s pretty embarrassing to comment on something in a way that reveals you literally didn’t consider the material at hand for more than 30 seconds. Or 29, to be exact. Limbaugh went on the air to praise Beyonce Knowles’ latest single “Bow Down / I Been On” for what he thinks is the song’s ode to submitting to your husband. “She got married, she married the rich guy, she now understands — she now understands it’s worth it to bow down,” he says. Listen to the segment here:

But if Limbaugh had listened to the song for fifteen seconds, he’d know that it’s addressed to the women Knowles addresses in the opening lyric, when she sings: ““I know when you were little girls/ You dreamt of being in my world.” and if he’d gotten all the way to the 29-second mark, he’d have heard Beyonce remind listeners, some of whom have been perturbed by her plan to tour as Mrs. Carter—her husband’s legal name—for her next album, “I took some time to live my life / But don’t think I’m just his little wife.” Now, I’m aware that Mr. Limbaugh is a busy man with a lot of time to fill, and that being sexually nasty to women in public life only goes so far, but you’d think that he has enough money to at least pay a staffer to listen to popular music he’s going to natter about on the air.

And part of what’s funniest about this is that if Limbaugh wanted to make a case that Beyonce’s an advocate for women making efforts to please their husbands, it wouldn’t have been too hard—he just needed to pick a different song. In “Countdown,” for example, Beyonce pulls out the Betty Draper drag to tell her listeners that “I’m all up under him like it’s cold, winter time / All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time / Do whatever that it takes, he got a winner’s mind / Give it all to him, meet him at the finish line”:

But then, maybe Limbaugh’s not ready to tell his female audience “Ladies, if you love your man show him you the fliest / Grind up on it, girl, show him how you ride it.” Though given the way he’s willing to talk about the sex lives of women he’s never met, and about which he knows precisely nothing, I’d hardly put it past him.

My friend Alan Pyke eviscerated Sen. Marco Rubio’s understanding of the issues that animate hip-hop, a genre he repeatedly claims to love, and that’s become the basis of his claim to be youthful and relatable, in a post here a month ago. In the time since, it’s been amusing to watch Rubio embrace this part of his cultural tastes that the mainstream media seems to find amusing, even to the point of absurdity, as happened when he joined Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, earlier this week.

Now, filibusters often have a reputation for silliness, whether it’s Senators reading from phone books, the question of how someone can go that long without relieving him or herself, or merely because of the futility of the event. But Paul’s filibuster, for all that I disagree with him on nearly every issue, and for all that I wish his concerns about the use of drones wasn’t limited to the use of them against United States citizens on U.S. soil, was a substantive, serious affair for the most part. So it was entertaining, and maybe a little jarring, to watch Rubio use the event not just as a way to poke the administration with a sharp stick, but to reinforce his credentials as a hip-hop head.

And make no mistake, he was diving for opportunities to mention rappers like a Hail Mary pass was on its way to his fingertips. When Rubio took the floor, he started out by telling his colleagues that: “In that question, he used Shakespeare references, he used a reference to the movie Patton, which is one of the great movies. I didn’t bring my Shakespeare book, so let me just begin by quoting a modern-day poet. His name is Whiz Khalifa. He has a song called ‘Work Hard, Play Hard.’ If you look at the time, it’s a time when many of our colleagues expected to be in the home state playing hard, but I’m happy that we’re here still working hard on this issue.” Later, discussion how former President George W. Bush’s use of drones would have been received by the Senate, Rubio mused: “That takes me back to another modern-day poet by the name of Jay-Z. In one of his songs, he wrote ‘It’s funny what seven days can change. It was all good a week ago.’ I don’t know if it was all good a week ago, but I can tell you that things have really changed. Because if the question was George W. Bush and this was a question being asked of him, and his response was the silence that we’ve gotten, we’d have a very different scenario here tonight.” Rubio even pulls hip-hop’s own cultural obsessions into the mix, saying he’ll “Go to a movie, one of the great American movies, The Godfather. There’s a quote in this movie—I don’t have the Patton quotes, but I have The Godfather quotes. This is one of the best-known ones. It says, ‘I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.’ To me, these are offers you can’t refuse.”

There’s something terribly middle-brow about Rubio’s attempts to demonstrate his cred, the equivalent of a college freshman proffering up Atlas Shrugged quotes as proof of erudition and a sophisticated worldview. It’s even tackier to watch him scramble, Patton quotations aside, given the general seriousness of Paul’s filibuster. And it raises the question of what Rubio expects to get out of the fact that liking hip-hop has become a critical part of his brand.

Is it supposed to signal that he’s young? President Obama is ten years Rubio’s senior and has had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate that he hasn’t just surfed Rap Genius, he’ conversant with ongoing issues like the genre’s gender politics and has beefed with Kanye West from the White House podium. Is it meant to reel in rappers as endorsers when 2016 rolls around? Somehow I doubt that Jay-Z will be so flattered that Rubio knows the lyrics to “A Week Ago,” even if he’s reversing their order—interestingly enough for a song about drone strikes, the track is about snitching—that he and Beyonce will suddenly switch parties. It’s not bad campaign strategy that Rubio knows how to surf a meme, as he did when a sale of water bottles raised $125,000 for his political action committee after he got gif.-ed reaching for a drink during his State of the Union rebuttal. But cleverness and snappiness aren’t the same things as wisdom. And if I were Rubio’s advisors, I’d be concerned that the candidate’s fondness for hip-hop and ability to roll with a joke were becoming the core of his brand. Those are better credentials to be someone’s frat brother than to be president.

If you get your internet through Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision or Time Warner, and you’re still downloading music, television, or movies without paying them, you may start feeling something in addition to your guilt. In collaboration with the Center for Copyright Information, a group that includes both those internet service providers, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Independent Film and Television Alliance, and the American Association of Independent Music, the companies will let you know they’re watching what you’re up to:

As part of what’s known as the “six strikes” system, the ISPs will deliver to consumers a graduated series of six messages that starts with a warning and ends with some sort of action…While the first two alerts serve as warnings or reminders, the second two require consumers to confirm receipt of the message. The final two, called mitigation alerts, could result in some sort of action, like slower Internet connection or suspending service. The CAS doesn’t specify what consequences ISPs should impose on consumers and leaves it up to each ISP.

The Stop Online Piracy Act may have died last year, but it seems inevitable that internet service providers, as well as search firms like Google, would get into the business of trying to crack down on illicit downloads. Media consolidation means that cable and internet companies like Comcast have as part of their business model creating and distributing original content. An organization like Google seems to be gradually discovering that there’s more money to be had in distributing, if not yet creating, original content instead of merely showing other people where they can find other distributors. In other words, the interests of the people who make content and the interests of the people who help people get to that content are converging.

Whether this is a preferable turn of events for SOPA opponents is up to them. I certainly hope it becomes clearer which providers are levying which consequences as the system goes into place. And from both a business and consumer behavior perspective, it would be great for notices to include information about where consumers could get the same content licitly, though that would pose a formidable technical challenge, and it might feel too invasive to consumers for ISPs to be monitoring their activity at that granular a level. There may always be some consumers who have no interest in paying for certain content, or supporting it by sitting through ads, an attitude I think shows very little awareness of what it takes for that content to keep getting produced, and ISP warnings probably won’t do much to deter those folks. But helping consumers who do understand that nothing comes for free find ways to give their money or their eyeballs to the people who produce and distribute that content—or to let them know when they’ll be able to do so if something isn’t available legally yet—could help change practices. Then, government could be in the position of advocating for well-intentioned consumers, while still letting internet and content companies develop their business models in an organic way.

I was confused, and somewhat excited, earlier this week when I first saw a link to a video that purported that the Norwegian Army was captured on video doing the Harlem Shake. Memories flooded back to my time in high school in Flint, MI, and watching my classmates pull off the moves associated with the dance in the darkness of the gym. I clicked, curious to see how a dance associated with Harlem had made its way to Norway after all these years.

That hint of excitement soon gave way to disappointment. Expecting the smooth choreography that I had known, what I was greeted with was a mass of flailing to an electonica song I’d never heard before. The song wasn’t the issue, called “Harlem Shake” and released by Harry Rodrigues, also known as the producer Baauer, last year. No, my problem was with the dancing itself. No unity, no precision, no sense that anything was going on other than pure chaos hiding under the label of a dance that’s existed for years.

That disappointment in turn gave way to dismay when I realized that the Norwegian video was by no means a fluke, but instead just one entry in what has become a meme of global proportions. That meme reached what I can only hope is its breaking point as the anti-debt group “The Can Kicks Back” posted their own version of the video, showing former Former Comptroller General David Walker and former Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin taking part:

If that truly is the death knell of this meme, I certainly will not miss it once it’s gone.
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I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ column about Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city in the New York Times yesterday, and was struck by his description of the way that much of the hip-hop canon that’s concerned with violence (which, of course, not all of it is) situates its speaker in relationship to that violence:

Hip-hop originates in communities where such hazards are taken as given. Rappers generally depict themselves as masters, not victims, of the attending violence. Their music is not so much interested in exalting to our preferred values as constructing a fantasy wherein the author has total control and is utterly invulnerable.

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.

I think that passage hit me in particular because of some of the thinking I’ve been doing lately about the way violence operates in film and television. I’ve been showing my boyfriend The Wire, and I think both of us were hit pretty hard, him for the first time, me in new context, by the opening of the ninth episode, “Stray Rounds.” To my mind, the sequence, in which Bodie’s crew’s beef with another set of dealers spirals out of control, is one of the most effective critiques of Hollywood treatment of guns ever filmed:

No one on either side of the gunfight gets hit. No balance of power changes in the slightest. And even more to the point, no one is any good at using the guns they’re brandishing so casually. Much of the time, they’re not looking when they pull the triggers on their handguns, much less aiming at actual targets. Even if they were taking aim, it’s not at all clear to me that any of the participants would be decent shots. Part of the reason they’re not aiming, though, is because they’re terrified, and hiding behind cars. This is a world where bullets don’t miraculously breeze pass our heroes, or where our heroes have the uncanny ability to know when to dodge and are fast enough to actually do it. When Bodie needs a new clip in the middle of the fight, he fumbles awkwardly for it in his sock. Nothing about this is sophisticated, much less effective.

While this scene is a particularly striking sequence, this attitude is relatively common in The Wire as a whole. Even Omar, the character in the show who possesses the most virtuosic ability with a gun, fails a lot. He misses when he tries to assassinate Avon and gets shot himself, though mostly through his assailant’s good luck. As Maurice Levy points out during his testimony against Bird, most of Omar’s assaults are “by pointing,” rather than involving Omar actually pulling the trigger. When Omar shoots Brother Mouzone, it isn’t a single, accurate killing shot: it’s painful and non-fatal and Mouzone survives. Later, when Omar and Mouzone team up to kill Stringer Bell, the same is true: there’s a chase, and fear, and it takes more than one shot to bring their collective enemy down.

In other words, The Wire makes a series of points that Hollywood almost always ignores. Guns are hard to use. Firing them accurately takes a significant amount of skill, and even then, is extremely difficult to do in moments of stress, or fear, or when a gun is being fired at you. Even given all of those things, guns are extremely lethal, and getting shot with one, even if you don’t die, is extremely painful and frightening. At a moment when we’re hearing a lot of talk about the magical abilities conferred by simple possession of a gun, those are things worth remembering.

Senator and 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio is a “hiphop connoisseur,” or so the National Journal’s social media person would have us believe. The last time Rubio cashed in some rap cred was in a November interview with GQ, and that interview appears to have a decent shelf life with the DC media. It’s the sole source for the lead section of the National Journal listicle that argues the Florida senator’s “eclectic taste in music” is a key to his appeal as the next face of a political party that’s not so much reinventing itself as taking sandpaper to its rough edges. Rubio’s hip. He’s with it. He knows the name of hiphop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. He knows Tupac was from New York. He knows Eminem is “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth.” He– wait, what?

GQ: Your three favorite rap songs?
Marco Rubio: “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A. “Killuminati” by Tupac. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”…I’m not like an athlete. The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He’s a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that’s what I enjoy about it. It’s harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can’t put it on.

If you think “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth” is Eminem, you do not listen to enough hiphop. If “Lose Yourself” is your favorite Eminem song, you don’t listen to enough Eminem. And if you’re milking hiphop for credibility while marginalizing its challenges to the kinds of policies and narratives that Republicans run on, you might need to test your listening comprehension, period.

But there’s something worse than poseur bombast afoot if you tell a national men’s magazine that Em’s the only deep or even sort of deep emcee, during a conversation predicated on how cool and rooted and atypical-Republican you are as a person. You’re counting on that magazine being so enthralled by the notion of a Republican who has a passing knowledge of rap that they don’t notice how ignorant and shallow a statement you just made. You’re trusting that your interviewer won’t come back with a question about the potential subtexts of claiming that the only current rapper with rich and abiding lyrical value is the white one. Most of all, you’re manufacturing an image of a conservative capable of communing with the youths, giving future profile writers a ready-made clickbait depiction of you as “Not Your Grandfather’s Republican.” (Those reporters will even give you credit for understanding “how early ’90s rappers in California were like journalists who reported on the conditions in their communities,” as the Journal’s Elahe Izadi did, despite the fact that Rubio doesn’t express that (accurate) notion in the GQ interview she linked.)
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My guest blogger is Alan Pyke, a writer and commentator on film, television, fiction, music, and politics, with a particular fascination for hiphop. He reviews movies and concerts for BrightestYoungThings.

Over at The New Republic, Erik Nielson has a somewhat strange piece up about President Obama’s relationship to what he projects as a monolithic hip-hop community:

Although he said in a 2008 interview that he saw a place for hip-hop in the national dialogue, his engagement with it has largely consisted of slips and quips—calling Kanye West a “jackass” for interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammy’s, joking at the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that he sings Young Jeezy to Michelle, revisiting the Kanye remark, and so forth. Yes, he has maintained a close relationship with Jay-Z, self-proclaimed hip-hop royalty, but perhaps more telling was his 29-song campaign playlist for 2012: It didn’t have a single rap song on it. This year’s inaugural playlist is revealing as well; while it does have songs by Nick Cannon and the Far East Movement that would qualify as rap, these aren’t exactly the names you’d expect from the man who claimed to “love” hip hop…

Other rappers have been far more ambivalent in their support. Speech, of Arrested Development, supported Obama in 2008, but came out for Ron Paul in 2011, saying he’d become disillusioned with Obama. But then, as the election approached, Speech hopped back on the bandwagon, taking to social media in support of the president and encouraging others to vote for him. Killer Mike came out in support of Obama in 2008, but on R.A.P. Music, one of the best albums of 2012, he went on the attack. On the song “Reagan,” he characterizes Obama as “just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters” and goes on to compare his foreign policy to the Gipper’s. Yet, even as that song was raising eyebrows across the country, Mike was insisting in interviews that he wanted Obama to win reelection, going so far as to claim that black voters would sell out their race if they didn’t support him in 2012: “If you don’t vote for Obama this time you’re a fuckin’ race traitor,” he said.

Nielson seems to assume that there’s such a thing as a coherent hip-hop community that determines both what does and doesn’t count as rap—even though MCing is a vocal style that’s thoroughly penetrated (and to a certain extent, been assimilated by) pop music—and that sets out a coherent political agenda that rappers collectively endorse. One of the things that’s been musically and politically fascinating about hip-hop in recent years has been its fragmentation, rather than its coherence. The East Coast-West Coast polarity is a thing of the past. Jay-Z made the transition to respectable mogul. Kanye West exemplifies the path of middle-class MCs. The internet’s made it easier than ever before for aspiring rappers to make tracks go viral—it’s a lot easier to email or tweet a link to a YouTube video or a SoundCloud playlist than to pass cassettes hand-to-hand. Hip-hop’s status as a giant business means that the antipathy for government Nielson talks about can mean a distaste for paying taxes as much as rage against the police. Credibility fights flare up all the time, but it’s not as if Nicki Minaj isn’t going to sign a giant American Idol judging contract because a Council of Hip-Hop Elders might look askance at her for it.

And ultimately, it’s totally possible for rappers, like the rest of us, to weigh disparate elements of a presidential candidate’s agenda and record and decide that, in a two-party system, a guy with, say a foreign policy record you find deplorable might be worth voting for anyway because of his domestic agenda. It makes total sense that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (who by Nielson’s standards might only “qualify as rap”) might be more excited about President Obama’s evolution on marriage equality than the kinds of guys who toss around “no homo” disclaimers, that Jay-Z might be paying more attention to the economy given his work in moving the Nets to rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn while Lupe Fiasco prioritizes the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in the war on terror.

Saying hip-hop has a part in the national dialogue is an acknowledgement of what’s already happening musically, and a useful if overdue declaration that rappers aren’t pariah artists, excluded from the political conversation by virtue of their art form’s origins. But an openness to listening to new voices isn’t a commitment to a dialogue or a musical style. And Lord forbid hip-hop codify itself musically or politically as the price of getting to be heard politically.

Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s major-label debut “Finally Rich” has sparked verbal sparring among rap critics about cultural tourism and hiphop. This valuable conversation began with a glowing review by Jordan Sargent, and an angry response from RapRadar’s Brian “B.Dot” Miller. The central controversy is over the responsibilities we have when we talk about hiphop, and who should be allowed access to and influence over those conversations. Sargent is white, and Miller is black. Miller insisted on the New York Times ArtsBeat podcast that his distinction between tourism and legitimate participation in hiphop culture is based upon tenure and not melanin, and the disagreement over Chief Keef does not break along simple racial lines at all. But there is a natural suspicion of white voices in hiphop discourse.

The controversy over Keef is in many ways about the age-old lyrics vs. music wrestling match over how to value hiphop. Craig Jenkins has already eviscerated the “community of gatekeepers” who insist Keef’s lyrical content removes him from serious consideration or threatens to destroy hiphop. I’ll try to add something to the parallel thread about cultural tourism, white privilege, and good intentions.

Suspicion of white folks in conversations about hiphop is natural, and more valid than most acts of cultural gatekeeping. American history makes this inescapable. We’re a superpower built in record time thanks to 400 years of stolen labor and stolen lives, and another 150 of systematic oppression of the descendants of that thievery. (That that oppression is now abstract rather than legislated does not make it disappear.) This makes white appropriation of black cultural output inherently more problematic than, say, a Greenwich-born Bentley-driving 17-year-old who finds her angst validated and channeled in the music of impoverished Appalachia. Or a dentist’s son pouring the pain money can’t treat into an identification with music by blue-collar drug-addicted pop geniuses. The honky-tonk bar crowd might be wary of the rich girl, and the punk club might be angry to learn the mosher among them is going home to financial security and a nuclear family. But class divisions may go unnoticed, and even if they don’t the gap in privilege that financial class breeds is limited, and most of all, impermanent. Progress for the rich is, to borrow a phrase, fragile and reversible.

When it comes to hiphop, the privilege gap between the outsider and the insider is based on hundreds of years of brutality. When suburban white privilege comes to the rap show, it’s crossing a hell of a lot more space, and that space is going to be enforced by society far into the future. (To steadily decreasing effect, inshallah.) Straight, white, and male is the easiest difficulty setting in life. Even the white kids who were dealt a bad socioeconomic hand are holding it at a damn good table. And again, history: However sincerely we participate in hiphop culture, we’re beneficiaries of systematic oppression finding an outlet in the anthems of the systematically oppressed. This is the source of the suspicion that sometimes greets white hiphop heads, and which lingers to some extent even after we succeed in proving our sincerity and depth of knowledge or curiosity about the culture. This is why some people call us tourists even after we’ve stayed awhile and taken up residence in hiphop culture.

There are a lot of us expats, in an ill-defined space between those raised on black music and culture and those just-visiting dilettantes. We think we’ve earned some standing (and some codeswitching). But some folks regard us more as colonists. And that’s not a crazy sentiment, especially as regards white folks’ interest in violent drug rap. Dave Bry’s New Republic piece does a nice job of explaining why:

For me, a white person, a rap fan who does in fact enjoy Chief Keef’s album, for musical reasons, much the same as I enjoy Waka Flocka Flame’s music, even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message—a person who likes to think that I can compartmentalize various elements of artistic expression, and appreciate music without any agenda—it’s worth giving hard thought to what it means that a black person is saying that she can’t. It’s worth ruminating on how deeply and insidiously white privilege and the black lack thereof infect every aspect of life in America—even something as simple as enjoying a good pop song. […] We want it to be different, us well-meaning white people. Maybe that’s even part of why we listen to rap music, or part of why we started to, anyway, because we want to do our best to make amends, to bridge the divide. We don’t want to be outsiders; we don’t want for there to be such a thing as outsiders. We want it to be different, but it’s not.

We want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. (Quoting “The Wire” sagely is another primary identifier of us would-be expats.) I don’t agree with Bry about Chief Keef on artistic grounds – based on two spins of “Finally Rich” and video evidence of his formulaic plug-and-play vapidity as an emcee, I want badly to side with Keef’s critics – but he’s dead on that it should be impossible to consider the Keefs and Flockas and Gunplays of the world completely outside of moralized critique, no matter how much serious white fans of their music might wish it so. Still, I think Bry missed a spot.

When he says he enjoys thuggish rap “even as I find the lyrics banal and deplore much of their message,” he’s pleading innocent of partaking in ign’ant shit as escapist fantasy. This seems disingenuous. Part of the appeal of everybody from Keef to Nate Dogg is that they give us access to a synthetic blend of toughness, indomitability, and limitless sexual potency that most of us don’t actually enjoy. Those banal lyrics and deplorable messages aren’t just part of the fun– they are the fun. That folks like Bry or myself aren’t enjoying this stuff in a mocking or ironic way does not make it completely above-board. We’re getting sincere enjoyment from something that makes us feel more alive, but as his piece notes so eloquently, we don’t live with the consequences when the music stops. Insofar as we white sojourners praise and download this stuff because it lets us play gangster, we’re taking advantage of the privilege gap Bry discusses.

And that gap puts the lie to the expat aspirations of even the most sincere and versed of white hiphop heads. Jamelle Bouie’s recent piece on his decision not to carry a flatscreen TV to his friend’s house alone, for fear of being taken for a thief, reminded me that my tourist status can’t be erased by my own actions. It’s imposed by the culture around us that assumes the worst about a black face – an attitude with much deeper roots than rap music, but which has been drawing strength from rappers for decades.

But Chief Keef can’t be responsible for that attitude. Neither can any other rapper. Images of black virility, self-determination, and power have scared white folks since long before Ice Cube nailed the motives of white cultural reactionaries in an interlude on his 1992 album “The Predator.” Every white hiphop head should check their privilege almost constantly. That privilege does not oblige us to be silent about our tastes or criticisms– much the opposite, in fact. It obliges us to speak a lot, because it obliges us to speak carefully and inquisitively, and recklessness always takes fewer words than consideration. Just playing good rap for our friends isn’t being down for any cause unless we’re also participating in the conversation about systems of oppression. Hiphop kickstarted that conversation long before we got here, and however much time we’ve put in learning this culture we should always acknowledge that we’re guests.

Otherwise, we’re not just tourists or commuters to hiphop, free to walk unjudged through the streets our musical heroes depict. We’re worse than that. We’re subconsciously preying on that privilege in order to enjoy feeling Like A Bawse in private. We’re colonizing the music of someone else’s struggle.