White star, black galaxy

Eminem is the man of the hour, but rap is still an African-American business.

By Amol Sarva

Nov 20, 2002 | Astrologers took note last week as a rare alignment graced their star charts. The auspicious sign: one Eminem, two No. 1 slots. This year's prince of hip-hop scored a pleasing symmetry, with the film "8 Mile" and its soundtrack album reigning atop the box-office charts and the Billboard charts in the same week.

In the marvel of a humanized Eminem, once just another angry thug, is yet another symmetry. The white rapper's transformation is hip-hop's, and in his race is the message that black music has gone mainstream. Eminems character in "8 Mile" climbs out of his Detroit ghetto on the merit of his stylish flow alone, an achievement all the sweeter for a young white kid in a black mans world. And so is born the record industrys white knight, he who will carry the budding hip-hop genre farther and deeper into the heart of a mostly white target market. Yet as his roman à clef meditates on hip-hop's color barrier, Eminem's observers miss the fact that this exception proves the rule and that his genre is anything but budding. Hip-hop is all grown up. And now, as much as ever, it is by and about black America.

Invented in the Bronx ghettos of the 1970s, the cultural form of hip-hop has found its target market in suburbs across America. From 1995 to 2001, the hip-hop market share boomed, increasing by 75 percent. (CD sales have sagged badly this year, but that's true across all musical genres.) This achievement was possible only because more than three-quarters of hip-hop record buyers were already white. Booming beyond music, hip-hop's biggest names are increasingly involved throughout the culture industries: fashion, TV, film and print. Twenty years after the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" hit the pop charts, hip-hop has managed something rock 'n' roll never could: It's popular, profitable and black.

Hip-hop has defied a central cliché of commercialization, unlike rock, jazz, and the blues before it. For all of the latter, Norman Mailer's observation that postwar American "cool" has repeatedly returned to black America for inspiration is true. But as hip-hop transformed from outsider to establishment, it has remained a creation by and about black Americans -- even if the product is for whites. Hip-hop's leaders, stars and aristocrats are predominantly African-American, from Russell Simmons to the Wu-Tang Clan to Lauryn Hill to Ja Rule, DMX and Nelly (who topped the charts just prior to Eminem's arrival). And on the world stage, hip-hop's subject matter, from NWA's 1987 "Fuck tha Police" to Jay-Z's 1999 "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)," continues to treat the experiences of American blacks.

Eminem's prominence in 2002 merely confirms that the occasional white rapper is by now a familiar novelty. In the early 1990s, Boston's Irish-American group House of Pain had rap's biggest hit, and it was the Beastie Boys who were rap's first superstars. But a check of the Billboard hip-hop chart last August found that 19 of the top 20 albums were from black performers (Eminem was at No. 4).

The surprise, in fact, is that there are so few Vanilla Ice-style knockoffs to mention. Rap records made up 11.4 percent of the $13.7 billion in U.S. record sales last year, and the confederate category of R&B accounted for another 10.6 percent. Rock, by comparison, has declined from over 40 percent in the late '80s to just 25 percent today. While "teen pop" and the travails of Britney Spears have made headlines lately, the treacle merely footnotes the rise of hip-hop. Mass-market breakout has long since happened.

The face of hip-hop is and always has been black. But so too are hip-hop's seats of power. Behind the stars is a universe of black producers and impresarios. This is where Eminem came from; he was discovered and packaged by black producer and entrepreneur Dr. Dre in 1999. Successful artists frequently start their own labels to sponsor whole coteries of affiliated acts or "families." And while the L.A.-based major labels have surely made fortunes distributing most titles, Master P's No Limit Records and Sean "Puffy-Puff Daddy-P. Diddy" Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment are clearly powerful, as are other black-run labels.

The list of hip-hop businesses has kept on growing, notably with the explosion into fashion of fabulously successful brands like Phat Farm, Karl Kani, And 1, Rocawear, FUBU and Combs' own Sean John line. Hip-hop is a world of black musicians, producers, film stars, moguls, critics and designers -- and white fans.

The story has often gone very differently in the history of American music. Commercialization has usually separated black America from its artistic progeny, as with the appropriation of jazz by the bourgeois elites, the usurpation of blues first by a white record industry and then by the international explosion of rock 'n' roll.

Next Page: Despite Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, rock became the music of white adolescent rebellion

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