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does come from a place where this kind of black performative identity was not unnatural to him, but it’s also performative in how he chooses to do it and how, as a performer, he directs it to appeal to not just the white crossover audience, but particularly to a black audience. What Eminem demonstrates clearly is that race now is not just about the color of your skin, it’s also about your psychology. It’s about you positioning yourself. It is a mix of conscious and unconsious factors that situate you in a demographic which your skin color might even deny. It’s a fact today and it took hip-hop to make this fact manifest. There have always been people who have had cross-racial identities, not because they are mixed-race, but because of how they grew up. But hip-hop laid it on the table that people were choosing an identity. Because of hip-hop, kids of all races and from different countries buy into what hip-hop says about their lives. These people’s life circumstances help dictate that they are different from what their skin color might say they are.”

America’s move toward this new racial reality has accelerated in the years following hip-hop’s mainstream takeover and Eminem’s ascension to prominence. In researching her book The Color of Our Future just a few years ago, Chideya interviewed teens of all races across the country and encountered a different sensibility. “I met black teens who seemed ‘black,’ classically black, and black teens who seemed ‘white,’ and every cross-hatch. This was in 1997 and one guy I interviewed was a white ‘black’ guy, a ‘wigger.’ At the time everyone was using that term and people were still freaked out that white kids listened to hip-hop if those white kids lived in Iowa or Indiana, and the guy I interviewed insisted that I not call him a ‘wigger.’”

Cross-race musical hybridization, pre-Eminem, was often regarded as a faux-pas.

When the eclectic electric folk singer Beck released Midnite Vultures in 1999 (his quirky tribute to soul, funk, Prince, and R&B), it was taken by some critics as an elitist hipster parody of black culture. Somehow, Beck’s stream-of-consciousness humor, the same that informed the line “Drive-by body pierce!” in “Loser,” the hit that introduced him to the world in 1994, was seen as pointed and judgmental. Some people particularly harped on “Debra,” an R&B ode sung in falsetto, by a guy who would like to “get with” the subject of the song, a girl named Jenny, as well as with Jenny’s sister, Debra. The vocals and the music are as earnest as the lyrics are hilarious, with the narrator asking Jenny to step inside his Hyundai after comparing her to ripe fruit and impressing her with a fresh pack of gum.

“My whole intention with that record was to tap into the kind of energy you see at a hip-hop show or an R&B show,” Beck told me in 2002. “It came out of a love for the music, but people think I’m making fun of it because I’m not afraid of humor. Particularly the song ‘Debra.’ I didn’t want to put it out at first because I knew people would think I was lampooning. ‘Debra’ wasn’t really meant to be funny. If you take the subject matter of one of these contemporary songs, it’s amazing what they get away with. I didn’t want to do a real white, soul, Al Green-influenced thing, because then I’d be in Steve Winwood territory, which is fine, but I wanted to duplicate where people were at in the R&B world. It’s funny because when I’d meet people in R&B and hip-hop, people like Timbaland, they really loved it, they totally got it. The only people that looked at it sideways weren’t involved in that world at all.”

Within this era’s shifting musical and cultural scene, Eminem is riding, and virtually is, the zeitgeist. His music is played on BET, MTV, and rock, rap, and Top 40 radio stations, and his fans range from the age of fifteen to fifty. Hip-hop is the language that erased many of these borders and is the common denominator upon which all racial influences mix freely, whether or not the roots or pathology of hip-hop culture is understood by more casual consumers. A generation