An assistant professor of hip-hop has proposed that rap audiences are less interested in white rappers’ angst than they had been in recent years for this reason: President Trump has made them “tired” of “unhinged white rage.”
The Guardian opined of white rappers, “These artists all initially found success with a melodic take on trap, a style rooted in the struggles of America’s inner cities, where young Black men are given few opportunities. Perhaps, post-George Floyd, these white rappers are reading the room and realising they need to embrace a sound that speaks more honestly to their experiences.”
AD Carson, a rapper and assistant professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia, told The Guardian: “White anger and confidence is something rap audiences just don’t want to hear as much of any more,” adding that the shift “has everything to do with the current political landscape.”
“The unhinged white rage Eminem had great success with in the early 2000s was an extension of a kind of repressed rage felt all across white America,” Carson added. “Yet this rage is the same thing you now see coming out of the White House every single day. The idea of white grievance or supreme white confidence has taken the front seat over the last four years through Trump, and a lot of the audience is tired. Even if a white rapper truly came from struggle, the anger they carry might still struggle to cut through. They need to approach things differently now.”
“With white rappers and artists, it is much easier to shift into new sounds than it is for Black artists,” he continued. “It’s something we’ve seen with Pink and Miley Cyrus, who both tapped into a Black R&B sound before embracing a quite obviously white stadium-pop aesthetic when the market called for it. White rappers can move between genre spaces in a similarly easy way as they’re not as hard-coded to the racial injustices that go with hip-hop culture like Black artists maybe are.”
In July, Snoop Dogg said of Eminem, “White rappers had zero respect in rap, Dre has probably put Eminem in the position where he could be labeled as one of the top 10 rappers ever. I don’t think so, but the game feels like he’s top 10 lyricists and all that that comes with it. But that’s just because he comes with Dr. Dre and Dr. Dre helped him find the best Eminem that he could find,” as Rap-Up reported.
Eminem responded, “Everything he said, by the way, was fine, up to a point. Him saying Dre made the best version of me, absolutely, why would I have a problem with that? Would I be here without Dre? F*** no, I wouldn’t. The rappers he mentioned from the ’90s–KRS One, Big Daddy Kane, [Kool] G Rap–I’ve never said I could f*** with them,” according to Complex.
Responding to Snoop Dogg saying he could live without Eminem’s music, Eminem stated:
I think it was more about the tone he was using that caught me off-guard ’cause I’m like, where is this coming from? I just saw you, what the f***? It threw me for a loop. I probably could’ve gotten past the whole tone and everything, but it was the last statement where he said, ‘Far as music I can live without, I can live without that s***.’ Now you’re being disrespectful. It just caught me off-guard. … I didn’t know what to do about it because it confused me ’cause I’m like, bro, same team. We’re on the same team. And I have never in my career, my entire career, said a disrespectful word about Snoop.”