I thought I should clarify how ‘white’ I am as it relates to that BET Cypher I posted last night. I didn’t really know of Mos Def as a musician until earlier this year — I remember him performing on Chappelle’s show, but I never made the connection that he was an actual musical artist — having first seen him in the Italian Job and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hadn’t heard of this guy Black Thought, who I thought ‘won’ that Cypher despite all three guys being amazing, at all though I knew very vaguely of his band The Roots.

Still though, I feel a little cheap writing about how ‘white’ I am when just last night I wrote a critique of Andrew Sullivan for talking about how ‘black’ America is. I also didn’t really do this completely by accident. I think that talking about how we talk about race is sort of a big deal. When Sullivan spoke about the blackness of America, what he seemed to be writing about was the culture of the South. Most of his readers who wrote in spoke about being white and Southern. It’s apt that I woke this morning to Ta-Nehisi Coates doing what he does best:

There are many reasons why it’s wrong to presume that your particular, specific, individual narrative of blackness is The Only Narrative Of Blackness Ever In All History.

Blackness is a lot of things, and I think conflating it with ‘Southern’ is probably not a great idea. It’s not wrong, but it’s not all right.

PostBourgie linked earlier today to a sick video that reminded me why white¹ is so frequently, and so deservedly, seen as a synonym for lame²:

Update: YouTube took down the original video I linked to, but there are many copies out there so I changed my post to point to an active one.

I also wanted to describe a little bit about how I feel about each of the three raps in the video. Mos Def’s is the first and probably the weakest, but it’s got a real laid back delivery that makes it feel more casual than most of the rap freestyles I’m accustomed to. Black Thought’s is the best overall with a throughline to the lyrics, lots of great similes, and just so smooth and controlled. Eminem’s, the one that seems to be seen as the best by the majority of people, is probably the best from a pure rhyme spitting level. He’s got a couple great lines in there, and he doesn’t let the beat slow down his frenetic flow. That said, he doesn’t win it in my eyes because he hasn’t grown up and started rapping about something other than teen pop stars, prescription drugs, and general violence. He can get a lot of rhymes out of that material — ‘kill a koala’ and ‘maul a chihuahua’ come to mind as does the killer line ‘My dick is so big, if I add another inch to it, you would swear when I raped you that you was actually into it’ — but I’m over it and so should he.

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Footnotes

1. Nobody thinks of Eminem as white [↩]
2. I had slightly more to write about this awesome video, mostly related to how white I am and was ignorant of the existence of these ‘cyphers’ and whatnot, but my browser crashed without auto-saving. C’est la vie. [↩]