white boys rappin and rockin:
the brand new minstrel show

The revolution started, as most do, with no possible inclination of how its very nature would be turned against the cause that engendered it. In 1993, an alluring new band out of L.A. released a record charged with class anger and indignance as racist injustice. The band: Rage Against the Machine, whose unique sound was forged by the union of Zapataist Zack De La Rocha's brittle, staccato rap vocals and the searing, acrobatic heavy metal guitar work of Tom Morello, one of the few actively working black guitarists in the industry. Backed by the powerful rhythm section of white guys Tim Cummings and Brad Wilk, the band built on the rap-rock experimentations of Ice T's Body Count, Public Enemy's collaboration with speed-metal band Anthrax, and the famous Run-DMC reworking of Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way.'

Rage's debut album, a genre-buster and a wild success, was largely the success it was thanks to the early-90s grunge music, which had rejected the excesses of late-80s glam metal in exchange for a punk-rock ethos and sounds. Suddenly, it wasn't cool to be a rich rock star player draped in Freddie Mercury-esque excess. It wasn't good enough to write songs about making more money, or getting laid. Now the watchword was pain, inner pain. With the exception of some of the songs by Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, most of the grunge rock superstars borrowed the Situationist/Absurdist sonics of the original punk movement, but none of the political fire that drove bands like the Sex Pistols, or the Dead Kennedys. Nirvana, kings of the grunge movement, dwelt almost exclusively on inner pain, the ennui of growing up in small-town Washington, and then the somehow even worse banality of being famous. Kurt Cobain prophesied in "Stay Away" that "I'd rather be dead than cool"¹ and by 1994 he'd fulfilled the promise. That he never explored the economic reasons why 'cool' had been co-opted by multinational corporations for marketing purposes, but instead merely seemed content to whine about being thrust into cooldom shows the depth of grunge's schizophrenic denial of its own roots in political protest.

This is what made Rage so popular. Their debut album was the first overtly political album of its caliber since U2's War album released almost a decade earlier. White kids all over place, especially fans of heavy metal, made the album a hit, and, of course, what is a hit will soon be emulated, or more likely, simply appropriated.

Enter rap-metal. By the late 90's, Rage had begun to realize the limits of rap-rock and after releasing their 1999 masterpiece, The Battle of Los Angeles, they began to think about calling it quits². Meanwhile, a bumper crop of mimic bands had popped up: Korn, Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit being the most famous of the bunch. Instead of Rage's politically charged protests at racism, economic oppression and imperialism, these bands opted, like their grunge-rock predecessors, to look inward, to their tortured souls, and, taking a cue from commercial rap music, to pick up the swagger and pretty-boy poses of glam-metal, except that now instead of makeup and teased hair, the playas sport tattoos and baggy jeans.

The result is a confused mish-mash of expressions of pain³ ("What to do/My life is through/Just wanna kill/Myself for you"⁴ ), and the declarations of hardness, sexual prowess, and hipness we've come to expect from the worst of 'gangsta rap.' Witness the lyrics to "Rollin'" :

"Now I know y’all be lov’in this shit right here
l.i.m.p bizkit is right here
People in the house put them hands in the air
Cause if you don’t care,
Then we don’t care
1, 2, 3, times two to the six
Jonesin’ for your fix
Of that Limp Bizkit mix
So where the fuck you at punk,
Shut the fuck up and back the fuck up,
While we fuck this track up⁵"

Aside from the egregious use of "fuck", what is most noticeable about lyrics like this what an awful, almost embarrassing parody of actual hip hop lyrics, circa 1989, these are. One kind of hopes that Fred Durst, the band's vocalist, isn't serious, that he doesn't actually mean this stuff. Unfortunately, he does.

The result is a sort of new kind of minstrel show, one in which, instead of trying intentionally to peddle racist jokes, the white folks actually think they're participating in, and contributing to hip hop culture, and to the extent that bands like Limp Bizkit get duets with corporate sellouts like DMX and Redman, I suppose Limp Bizkit is participating, just like Amos and Andy were "participating" in black culture. True, Durst isn't in blackface, but then again, maybe he is. He has, after all, adopted a chiefly black mode of discourse, and one look at him, at his "ghetto" swagger, his brand-name hip hop outfits, even the way he hold his wireless microphone, overhanded, with his elbow rotated laterally out in front of his person is copped from the "hard" MCs of latter-day hip hop.

He hasn't, needless to say, gone unnoticed. Rapper Mos Def wasted n o time expressing his extreme disdain of Limp Bizkit and Korn in his song "Rock and Roll," in which he reminds listeners exactly where that genre came from:

"My grandmomma was raised on a reservation
My great-grandmomma was, from a plantation
They sang - songs for inspiration
They sang - songs for relaxation
They sang - songs, to take their minds up off that
fucked up situation
I am... yes I am... the descendant (yes yes)
of those folks whose, backs got broke
who, fell down inside the gunsmoke
(Black people!) Chains on they ankles and feet
I am descendants, of the builders of your street
(Black people!) Tenders to your cotton money
I am.. hip-hop
'It's heavy metal for the black people'
I am.. rock and roll (rock and roll.. rock'n'roll)⁶ "

Implicit in the song is another idea: that white "rappers" like Durst, whose albums sell more than Mos Def's own⁷ are literally repeating the crimes of their forefathers who built a nation on the backs of slaves, except that here, white rap-rockers benefit not from slave labor, but rather from twenty years of hip hop, much in the same way the Rolling Stones were able to build a career on the same blues songs that no white folks in America were listening to until the Stones 'invaded' in 1964.

None of this is meant to imply that white and black musicians couldn't our shouldn't cross genres or cover songs by artists of another race Take for example, the song "Elvis Ate America" by Passengers, a U2-pseudonym, in which song Bono 'raps' a bio of Elvis to a beat made by Bristol trip-hopper Howie B. In this case the intent is precisely the opposite of Limp Bizkit's; Bono seems to be rapping badly on purpose, relying on stilted rhythms and forces rhymes, and more importantly, depicting Elvis as a greedy, partly evil genius (he's compared to Hitler and Nixon), calling him "Vanilla Ice Cream" and reminding us that "Dr. King died just across the lot from Elvis," the psychic weight of which is enough to give this author the creeps. Bono goes so far as to quote Chuck D (of Public Enemy): 'Elvis the public enemy/ Elvis don't mean shit to Chuck D/ Elvis changed the center of gravity."⁸

Elvis ate America. The rap-rock bands are, like Elvis, a creation of corporate America, appropriating whatever is expedient and profitable, ripping it from its context, and selling a generic, bland version of it to the white middle class. What is mind-boggling is that it works, that is, when one stops to consider that a genre of music whose main content is either pseudo-Made Guy swerve or Cobain-esque white boy pain, or a confusing mishmash of both, one wonders why the white kids eat it up so readily.