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he stole, supported, or assisted black culture for his own gain. The racial implications of Elvis as a pop-culture symbol often overshadow, particularly today, his early musical innovations born of the racial overlap in Southern folk music as well as his talent and charisma. Like Eminem, Presley possessed a deep gift. He had a rich, versatile voice. The fact is that he did not choose to be born white, though he surely benefited from it. Presley’s early era was innovative, combining black and white, country and western, and R&B into the vibrant rockabilly that touched a nation of teenagers while a nation of parents feared the immorality of it all. Elvis wasn’t alone in blending musical styles across racial lines. Chuck Berry, truly the father of rock and roll, developed the style in St. Louis blues clubs by adding a black flavor to white hillbilly music: “Maybellene,” essentially the first rock-and-roll song ever recorded (1955), was Berry’s interpolation of a hillbilly folk tune called “Ida Red.” The true legacy of Elvis Presley seems to be that he made the boundaries between black blues, white pop, and country and western irrelevant.

By the late sixties, rock and roll had become psychedelic folk music, the soundtrack of American dissent. Amid the backdrop of the Vietnam War, there was racially motivated violence following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act prohibited states from denying black citizens the right to vote, among other injustices. During that time, Sly Stone, a Texas-born Bay Area DJ who sang soul and doo wop, formed Sly and the Family Stone. At the height of the hippie era, the group was an idyllic rainbow coalition, blending psychedelic rock, soul, R&B, and pop without pause. Their members were black and white, men and women; and Sly’s lyrics set a revolutionary precedent of social awareness and commentary, a vision as utopian as it was realistic. Sly and the Family Stone redirected the message of soul, R&B, and funk music forever. Sly Stone, like James Brown, brought hard funk to the mainstream and infused it with an agenda of social commentary followed through in the seventies by Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and countless others. In a tumultuous societal climate, Sly and the Family Stone’s very membership challenged Americans on both sides of the race issue, as well as the lip-service equality laid out by our Constitution. In the late sixties, when the Family Stone’s white players took the stage at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, they were greeted with boos, and although Sly calmed the crowd, a near riot followed the band into the street. When the Family Stone were inadvertently caught in the Detroit riots of 1967, while gassing up their tour van, the black members were held at gunpoint by the National Guard. Sly’s rumored affair with Doris Day, which circulated after he covered her hit “Que Sera, Sera,” as well as his marriage to a white woman in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden crowd in 1974 brought the reality of racial integration to the mainstream in bold strokes.

In the eighties, Prince redefined pop music with his third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind. Playing nearly every instrument himself and recording it in his home studio, the Minneapolis native blended funk and soul with the New Wave and dance-pop styles of the white artists of his day. Prince’s sound dominated the decade: in his own work; the songs he wrote for other artists; covers such as Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U”; and the spectrum of acts, from Madonna to Terence Trent D’Arby, who learned from Prince’s template. Prince also toyed with gender preconception with an overtly sexual, androgynous image and stage gear that ranged from motorcycle jackets to high-heeled boots and skintight lace jumpsuits. Prince as a black man fronting a mostly white band, giving white music a black angle—and enjoying critical acclaim and commercial success—must have affected a young Eminem in the early eighties as much as the Beastie Boys did a few years later.

Elvis, Sly Stone, and Prince, like Eminem, are not your average