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By Root 601 0

artists or individuals. They are driven to express in their own terms, in spite of convention; to stand up and be heard apart from the pack. They were unique among the popular music and entertainers of their day, truly gifted innovators with the versatility and vision to challenge and alter perceptions in music—and by extension, society—and to set a new precedent. Artists of this caliber are signposts in American culture, reflections of their times, even if they, as Elvis did once he went Hollywood, change their musical trajectory. They were not the only artists to bring together black and white music the way they did, but each of them possessed the talent and a unique point of view realized enough to inform their image. All of them bore, from the start, performance personas that powerfully communicated the confluence of influences in their music. Elvis was a dreamboat rebel, a white-pop outlaw with the pompadour of black rock and rollers. Sly and the Family Stone were flamboyant, urban hippies, combining the garb and ideals of the middle-class kids who “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,” with a physical manifestation of what those ideals meant. Prince’s feminized, overtly sexual ladies’-man image was as complex and liberated as his musical scope, turning New Wave black with his racially and sexually mixed backing band.

Eminem is hip-hop’s signpost artist, the one gifted enough to blend black and white musical and cultural elements without compromising the integrity of the music. We are at a time in America in which blacks and whites and all races have culturally met on a wide patch of shared ground, where white rock acts freely appropriate rap and where black artists front an image of capitalism reminiscent of Donald Trump. Eminem stands squarely in the middle: accepted—and debated—by both sides. At the same time, his “meaning” is deeper. His achievement is doubly significant in spite of the cultural overlap of the times, because of the ingrained race identity inherent in hip-hop. In the thirty years of the music’s history, and in spite of a few respectable white MCs, hip-hop remained uniquely black in image until Eminem.

“My feeling about hip-hop was, and I mean this as a white rock critic, ‘oh good, finally something white people can’t steal,’” says Dave Marsh, one of the founding fathers of pop-music criticism, who has written books on Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, among others, including two best-sellers on Bruce Springsteen. “I never wrote that about hip-hop because I didn’t want to sound fake, but I thought it. Beyond whatever the nuances of the music are, which are hard enough to know if you didn’t grow up in that culture, there was the authenticity of race involved. As much as I hate the identity politics of it, it’s very valuable in hip-hop because it puts white people at the disadvantage they need to be at. Eminem has now shown that authenticity has very little to do with what you look like.”

A white man in a black man’s game: Eminem at The Source Awards in Pasadena, California, September 15, 2000.

The threat to this racial identity in hip-hop—the only arena aside from sports in which young black men dominate—will be problematic in the years to come. Eminem’s success, while undisputed in terms of his musical abilities, will surely raise issues of resentment for some black fans and may spark opposition to other white rappers (if any emerge that are on par with Eminem’s song craft) and even to the participation of white hip-hop fans in the culture. It is an understandable, perhaps unavoidable predicament. Eminem is the first white rapper of true skill who is worthy, beyond his commercial success, of a place in the hip-hop hall of fame, alongside the game’s great black lyricists. He has managed to be hardcore, confessional, and humorous in songs with articulated structure. In contrast, most of today’s black MCs revel in a commercially successful formulaic bling-bling or thug aesthetic. Those who complain that because of his color, Eminem is allowed to release rap that black artists could not are generally