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By Root 600 0

of kids who grew up with hip-hop’s flavor in pop culture has come of age, inspiring a deeper degree of hybridization even in traditionally white schools of music, such as heavy metal. Angsty bands such as Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park, whose music has loosely been labeled everything from rap-rock to neu metal, may be predominantly white acts (with some Hispanic and Asian members), but their singers rap their verses and wail their choruses over minor-key melodies while the bands’ DJs (in Linkin Park’s and Limp Bizkit’s cases) scratch out solos. The imagery of the bands is even more cross-racial. Korn spent a good deal of their early career in Adidas track suits, like Run-D.M.C., and were photographed with pit bulls and on low-rider bicycles, two symbols associated with West Coast Hispanic gangs. Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst wears baggy hip-hop gear and a backward baseball hat, which in the past signified a break-dancer who was ready to compete. Korn and Limp Bizkit were the first rock outfits to openly adopt hip-hop posturing in the late nineties, inspiring one writer in the alternative paper The Boston Phoenix to proclaim them “blackface metal.” The writer, Carly Carioli, found Korn’s “racial transgression” to be the expression of youth who choose, in the face of the complicated issues of race in this country, to express themselves in knuckleheaded gestures on par with fart jokes. Carioli might have felt the same about the simultaneous emergence of Kid Rock, a Detroit native who fuses classic rock with a pimp image and an oldschool rap delivery and who has been doing so since 1990.

In the face of these white hybrids Eminem more fully and organically expresses the state of race and hip-hop today.

“The problem for white artists is that there are very few people who are even near as good as Eminem,” Dave Marsh says. “But I think they should keep on keeping on. The future doesn’t lie in segregation, it lies in integration. What integration meant in the sixties, it might mean now: How about we let black people lead for a while. That’s how it plays out in Eminem’s story. Everybody knows Dr. Dre is there and is crucial to his process. At the same time, everybody knows Eminem is not Dr. Dre’s puppet.”

Like his integrated racial identity, Eminem’s music is an organic fusion of black and white: white as seen through a black lens and black as seen through a white lens. He is as proficient in a black art form as he is at finding a sugary melody. Like the best subversive pop of any variety, Eminem’s music manages to relate complex realities—from celebrity worship (“Stan,” “Superman”) to selfloathing and nihilism (“My Name Is,” “Role Model,” “The Real Slim Shady,”)—to pop radio. Eminem tells stories, like his most talented black counterparts, yet, from recorded freestyle raps such as “Greg,” about a kid with a wooden leg, to 8 Mile’s epic “Lose Yourself,” his output illustrates a confessional voice and a constructed, cinematic songwriting eye that is more typical of rock and roll and R&B than of hip-hop. Eminem has evolved musically as well, particularly on The Eminem Show, into a more guitar-laden, anthemic production style that is a unique, powerful amalgam of both traditions.

“What white rappers bring,” says André of OutKast, “is a fuck-it attitude. The Beastie Boys brought a fuck-it attitude, but it was more or less a party fuck-it attitude. Eminem’s attitude is ‘fuck it,’ I’ll say anything, to anyone, anywhere, fuck it, fuck it all. Who’s the hottest pop group on MTV right now? Fuck them. What did the president do? Fuck him, too. I think that’s what’s lovely about it. It ain’t like he’s trying to wear gold chains and shit and playin’ like he’s from my neighborhood. And people respect him for it. They can identify with all of it because it’s real. That’s all that people will identify with—what’s real to them.”

In this free-form climate in music and “racial performance,” the only true test is one of the oldest: Does the artist’s formula work? More important, is it credible? On this front, Eminem, as a talented white man,