It's not the late '90s anymore, so the novelty of a white dude who can rap is a bit lost on me. But last night Anderson Cooper profiled Eminem for 60 Minutes, and Em said something that drew a shrug from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
"I felt like I was being attacked," he told Cooper. "I was being singled out. And I felt like, is it because of the color of my skin? Is it because that, you're paying more attention? Is it because there's certain rappers that do and say the same things that I'm saying. And I don't hear no one saying anything about that. I didn't just invent saying offensive things."
I'm going to side with Eminem on this one, not because I disagree with Ta-Nehisi that Eminem's fame and success is predicated, to a certain degree, on the fact that a lot of white consumers -- men especially -- could relate to his rage while being confounded by similar sentiments expressed by black rappers. I don't think it's a contradiction that a segment of white America reacted with horror at Eminem's embrace of hip-hop culture, and for the first time worried seriously that aspects of what they saw as black cultural pathology could potentially spread to their own children like some kind of contagion. Eminem scared a lot of white people in the way Tupac Shakur didn't, because to them dude was an image of the future, while Tupac was the reason they moved to the suburbs in the first place. Eminem proved there was no escape.
Still, Eminem, for all his talent, has basically implied if he were black, he wouldn't be where he is today. On his White America, he made this fear explicit, saying, "Look at these eyes/baby blue/baby just like yourself/if they were brown, Shady lose/Shady Sits on the shelf ... look at my sales/let's do the math/if I was black/I would've sold half." So when TNC lobs "if you were black you'd be Cory Gunz," that's not so much a diss as a point of agreement.
