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By Root 607 0

Sparxxx, Haystack, Poverty, and Stagga Lee, have not enjoyed instant success. None of them approach the level of Eminem’s talent, but if they were close it would still not be enough. Eminem’s skills and success may have opened new doors for white rappers, but his legacy has set the standard forever higher, making their burden of proving themselves that much more difficult. The next great white MC will have to be better than Eminem, a quality that escapes 95 percent of the MCs of any race today. Even if a new white rapper doesn’t emerge in the near future, Eminem is wise enough to know the dangers of being a white rap also-ran; that parking lot is well populated. House of Pain’s Everlast had to switch to acoustic guitar in a kind of rock-rap-blues to hit the charts again in 1998 (Whitey Ford Sings the Blues), eight years after his solo rap album flunked. Vanilla Ice, after being exposed for inventing a gang-life past, fell into pop culture’s footnotes, despite a film, a live album, and a second album of rap in 1994 that aped the pot-and-gun-smoke vibe of Dr. Dre and Cypress Hill. He then, still aping the tastes of the day in 1998, reinvented himself as a rap-rock artist caught somewhere between the sound of Marilyn Manson and Limp Bizkit.

The Beastie Boys, Everlast, and Vanilla Ice (as well as every musician Eminem has ever criticized) all turned down (or rendered ridiculous) my requests to be interviewed for this book, perhaps afraid that, like Mark Wahlberg may have been on TRL with Eminem, they would be ridiculed by comparison. The goal of my query was made clear: nothing but to learn of their experiences as white artists in hip-hop and to find out if they felt times had changed. It couldn’t have been easy, as it wasn’t for Eminem. Perhaps the only answer worth noting is the only one that was given, in an e-mail response from Vanilla Ice’s manager. His e-mail followed a phone conversation in which the subject of “compensation” was brought up—in light of an author’s publishing advance for a book. I have no regrets that this work suffered for the lack of insight that Robert Van Winkle, a.k.a. Vanilla Ice, would have provided in the twenty minutes of phone conversation I could have purchased for $5,000. My apologies to readers who disagree.

In post-Eminem times, the fate of white rappers will be brighter if their talent and credibility are in the right place. More than any other pop music form, rap is supremely Darwinian; freestyle panache or connections (though this could be argued) is not all it takes. There is promising talent coming out of the Midwest, such as the young Asian rapper Jin and nineteen-year-old Eyedea, the winner of Blaze magazine’s 2002 Freestyle Battle, a white rapper who, despite offers from major record labels, has chosen to remain true to his roots on an independent, local label.

“For white rappers, there’s such a fine line between shit you can and can’t do,” Eminem says. “The main thing is to be yourself. A lot of white rappers—look at Vanilla Ice. Yo, he got exposed. You can only put up a front for so long before people start coming out of the woodwork like, ‘Yo, you didn’t grow up here, you didn’t do this.’ You talk about guns in your rhymes and you never shot a gun! Talkin’ about shit you never lived, you’ve never even seen. If you ain’t got the balls to walk up and sock somebody in the mouth, don’t write it down, because if you say that shit on wax, you’re gonna get tested. If you’re not that type of person, don’t say it! Don’t talk about growing up in hard times in the city if you grew up in the fucking suburbs. White rappers, if they grew up in the suburbs, should play off it, like, ‘Hi! I’m white.’”

chapter 5

became a commodity because i’m w-h-i-t-e caucasian persuasion—flipping the race rap

At first it confuses people. It’s like seeing a black guy do country music.

—Dr. Dre. 1999

The West Side Highway hums like radio static. The light poles and parking signs lining Forty-sixth Street are plastered with stickers, some still bright but advertising a faded product. The newest ones