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It isn’t a new situation in hip-hop, but the emergence of a white rapper with undeniable skill and the embrace of the mainstream has brought the debate to a head. Of late, as the American government becomes increasingly right wing, opting for Big Brother security over civil liberties, hip-hop seems to be more of a target, even at the business level, as both the law offices of So So Def Records and Tha Row Records were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into whether these legitimate businesses were once funded in part by drug dealers’ money. In an industry in which far too much media ink has been spilled over rappers’ arrests for everything from speeding tickets to unregistered firearms possession to rape accusations, the hip-hop community’s worry that a white, “safer” version of hip-hop is more attractive to white corporate advertisers, and may dictate future artist signings, development, and promotion, may be thoroughly warranted.

In the article that resulted from The Source’s March 2003 round-table—those assembled included CEOs such as Roc-a-Fella’s Damon Dash and So So Def’s Jermaine Dupri, and artists such as Fabolous, Eve, and Talib Kweli—the conversation ranged from how major-label moneymakers such as Dash give back to the community to how little the younger artists, such as Fabolous, actually know about the system that is paying them, from the materialistic mentality among younger fans to what kind of responsibility the artists and labels have as role models and creators of the culture. Given the nature of the subject matter, pat solutions are impossible, but the conversation has begun.

A finger for the preconceptions: Eminem with Dr. Dre at his first MTV Music Awards on September 9, 1999.

A more visceral, less-informed reaction to Eminem is the racially charged view of The Source co-owner and rapper Ray Benzino, born Ray Scott, who, while he protested Eminem’s embrace by a mainstream media of America that does not afford blacks the same treatment, essentially questioned Eminem’s right as a white man to be a rapper. Benzino, a half-white Boston native, had spent a decade in hip-hop in two groups, the Almighty RSO and Made Men, and as a solo artist, producing and performing with little success despite elaborate marketing campaigns that ranged from expensively outfitting a truck to drive through Boston playing RSO’s album, to Made Men’s monthly three-page advertising spreads in The Source, an endeavor, before it became known that Benzino was secretly a co-owner of the magazine, that would consume most of the promotional budget for a major artist. Benzino befriended The Source cofounder David Mays some time in the midnineties but the details of their business arrangement and friendship were not made public so much as exposed in 2001, when Benzino prepared to launch his solo career and began to be listed in the magazine’s masthead. In 1994, however, after Mays inserted an article praising the Almighty RSO into the magazine without the consent of his editors, his top tier staff quit and his cofounder Jonathan Schecter thereafter sold his interest in the magazine. Benzino’s albums, The Benzino Project and Redemption, are littered with cameos by artists who had enjoyed major Source coverage or did shortly afterward: Pink, Puff Daddy, Scarface, Foxy Brown, Snoop Dogg, Mobb Deep. Benzino himself was granted the December 2001 cover, later declared a “collectors’ cover” in a Source retrospective. In the months leading up to Benzino’s second solo release (excluding a remix album) Benzino made disparaging comments about Eminem and dropped a bootleg single on which he called Eminem “Vanilla Ice 2003.” In an MTV News interview, he maintained that the controversy was not racial, but in subsequent bootleg singles he proved otherwise. He questioned Eminem’s legitimacy, falsely claiming that Eminem portrays a gangsta image in his music that doesn’t jibe with reality. Benzino claimed to be singling out Eminem as the “hood ornament” of the white corporate machine he wished to call attention