Cultural Thrifting: On Whiteness and Marketability in Hip-Hop
According to Billboard charts, and take them for what you will, Seattle rapper/producer duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis currently have the number one rap song in the nation, and the number two most popular song of any genre with their hit single “Thrift Shop.” Maybe you’ve heard it and its hook extolling the virtues of thrift store shopping as “fucking awesome.” Maybe you’ve seen the video where Macklemore drives around in a delorean and wears a leopard skin coat. If you did see that video, or any of his numerous TV appearances, you may have noticed that Macklemore is white, and this specifically has a lot of people talking about Macklemore.
In an article provocatively titled “Stop Saying Nice Things About Macklemore’s Thrift Shop” Brandon Soderberg at hip-hop oriented magazine Spin called “Thrift Shop” “The worst song in the country” and described Macklemore as “Only slightly above jerks who go to [thrift stores] for halloween outfits” in the “Hierarchy of people who shop at Goodwill.” At Racialicious Hel Gebreamlak wrote about Macklemore’s second single “Same Love,” which discuses homophobia in hip-hop, saying: “Though Macklemore may not be blaming Black people for homophobia, by focusing on homophobia in Black community spaces as opposed to the pervasiveness of homophobia everywhere, white people get to remove themselves from the problem.” This in turn led to a piece by Rich Juzwiak on Gawker where he responds that “It’s ludicrous to think that Macklemore, because of the makeup of his identity, should not comment on culture that is only ignorable if you are trying to ignore it. I can say with certainty that Gebreamlak is not a rapper, and I know for damn sure that he is not Macklemore, and yet there he is, writing about rap and Macklemore.” Clearly then, this topic is touching some nerve in people that makes them want to write about it, but while many of their complaints are valid, I think generally the conversation we’re having isn’t the right one.
Gebreamlak is right about Macklemore’s privilege to comment on hip-hop’s problem as a relative outsider, and Soderberg is absolutely correct in stating that “when you didn’t have to wear hand-me-down threads or thrift-shop clothes your whole life, there’s a novelty to wearing them in your 20s so you have some extra beer money.” But none of this is new to Macklemore. Quite possibly the preeminent writer on rap music in this generation, Jon Caramanica astutely discusses hip-hop’s “Centerless future” in the New York Times and how Macklemore, and Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and its resulting meme, represent just another step towards that future. According to Caramanica, since its inception in the South Bronx in the 1970’s, hip-hop has slowly moved away from that center in black culture. Furthermore that process is only rapidizing today due to the spread of music online, as opposed to being tied to an actual location. This trend is undeniable. Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys put out Licenced to Ill almost 30 years ago, and hip-hop has only spread more into white culture since then. If you want a more recent example of an “outsider” making the sort of party-rap that Macklemore has become famous for listen to Big Baby Gandhi’s “Boogie Nights” off his 2012 album “No 1 2 Look Up 2.” BBG is a South Asian rapper from Queens, NY and yet he has largely avoided questions about his validity to rap.
Part of that is of course due to Gandhi’s being still a minority, and far less popular than Macklemore, but as Caramanica rightly points out in the same article, a lot of the issues surrounding Macklemore have more to do with his audience than him.
Macklemore may be a rapper. . . but his audience is something else . . . . Macklemore’s success is a reminder that in 2013 it is possible to consume hip-hop while remaining at a far remove from the center of the genre or, in some cases, from black culture altogether. That’s not only because Macklemore is white. . . or because his audience is mainstream. It’s because on “Thrift Shop” the rapping is merely a tool to advance ideas that are not connected to hip-hop to an audience that doesn’t mind receiving them under a veneer of hip-hop cool.
This to me signifies the real reason people are having such a problem with Macklemore, it’s not simply that a white guy can’t comment on the hip-hop community, it’s that this white guy is doing it to an audience whose first engagement with hip-hop may have been through Macklemore.
Macklemore’s not the first white rapper, and his rise to is most certainly not the first time people have used “A veneer of hip-hop cool” to make a quick buck. Constructing this veneer represents a failure to truly engage with the genre, and is frequently done through an introduction of whiteness or white-approved art forms. Two other examples of this are the critical rise of jazz-rap, and the handling of hip-hop’s visual culture by museum’s and “high-art” institutions. Hopefully these two stories will highlight the problems with the way people have been talking about Macklemore; he alone is not the problem, just the most recent example of a disheartening pattern.
Jazz-rap is a form of rap music where the instrumental track that is rapped over is built of samples from jazz songs, and in which both the beat and the rapper’s flow will conform to widely accepted jazz codes. Justin A. Williams tells the full story of jazz and jazz rap’s rise in the late 1980’s, and it’s greater acceptance by the critical community in his article The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music. The first thing Williams notes is jazz’s establishment as “Serious art music” in the 1980’s through revivalists like Wynton Marsalis (Williams 2010, 437) and the introduction of things like jazz ensembles as a common part of high schools’ bands (Williams 439). This then sets the stage for the rise of jazz rap. Williams identifies a few groups in particular as representative of the new genre, groups like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Digable Planets amongst others. These groups mixed jazz instrumentals with oftentimes abstract, afro-centric, and/or socially conscious lyrics as a means of establishing themselves as separate from pop rap and other forms of the genre (Williams 441-2). This separation though wasn’t entirely self created, rap journalists frequently used the jazz sound as a base for writing about these groups’ music as more intelligent than other rap. One writer is quoted in Williams’ article as saying that A Tribe Called Quest’s album The Low End Theory “demonstrated that hip-hop was an aesthetic every bit as deep, serious and worth cherishing as any in a century plus of African-American music…giving a rap the same aesthetic weight as a Coltrane solo” (Williams 453). What this quote implies is that rap music only becomes “serious” music when it adopts another white-approved “serious” genre.
A particularly interesting example of the critical hierarchy between jazz and other forms of rap music can be seen in the reaction to two albums released around the same time in 1993, Digable Planets debut Reachin (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and Dr. Dre’s solo debut The Chronic. Here’s what one review of Reachin, also quoted by Williams (455), had to say about the two albums:
In the early 1990s, while Suge Knight’s Death Row records dominated hip-hop with artists like Dr. Dre and Tupac, Digable Planets chose the same high road that De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest had already taken — they all but ignored gangsta culture…Their debut, Reachin’, invaded college boom boxes.
Two things are happening here. One, Digable Planets’ jazzy sound and non-violent lyrics are labeled the “high road” in direct comparison to Dr. Dre. Note that the “high road” doesn’t just imply that one is more valuable from an artistic standpoint, but also that one is morally superior to the other. The other important piece to the quote is the mention of “college boom boxes.” This implies a different audience for Digable Planets, one that is better educated, and most likely wealthier and whiter than that of Dr. Dre. This review then reads as an almost explicit claim that rap is only art when white people listen to it. It is worth noting though that time has allowed for critical acceptance of both jazz and gangster rap, with Dre’s Chronic now a well established part of hip-hop’s canon. A relisten to the Chronic will even reveal a whole lot of walking basslines and other jazz codes that established other rap as more serious than it in these critics’ eyes. The difference in reception then may have less to do with stylistic forbearers, and much more to do with America’s fear of angry young black men airing their complaints about America for the rest of the country and world to see. This places Diggable Planets and Dr. Dre in an even larger and longer history of whites endorsing black men who are the least outwardly hostile towards them.
As Derrick P. Alridge and James B. Stewart note in their article Hip-Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future, hip-hop consists of more than just music, it is a visual and cultural phenomenon as well (Alridge & Stewart 2005, 190). Derek Conrad Murray writes about the intersection of the visual aspect of hip-hop, museums, and race in his stellar article Hip-Hop vs High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle. Murray looks closely at two exhibits on hip-hop and visual culture, One Planet Under a Groove: Hip-Hop and Contemporary Art (Bronx Museum, 2001) organized by Lydia Yee and Franklin Sirmans, and Sirmans later traveling exhibit Mass Appeal: The Art Object and Hip-Hop Culture (2002). Both of these exhibitions contained visual works by a multiethnic group of artists inspired by hip-hop culture, and not memorabilia like past hip-hop based shows (Murray 2004, 7). Murray had this to say about the shows:
Mass Appeal like its forbear makes hip-hop safe, palatable viewing for a curious, albeit apprehensive, high-art public…These exhibitions, though ambitious, could be read by some as dangerously anthropological in tone: that they parade ethnic artists around…For some, hip-hop must ultimately be domesticated and watered down to be palatable for art-world consumption.(7-8)
The treatment of hip-hop culture in these two exhibitions is quite similar then to the critical embrace of jazz-rap; in both cases hip-hop had to be made safe (by the addition of a familiar and accepted genre in jazz-rap’s case) before they could be accepted by the “high-art” public. Murray goes on to speculate that Yee and Sirmans “Would most likely be applauded for [presenting hip-hop in high-art context], as hip-hop brings with it instant sociopolitical relevance and pop-culture cool. It is also an easy target for criticism on many fronts for its overt violence, misogyny, homophobia and grotesque materialism” (8). And as we can see from Macklemore’s “Same Love” this wouldn’t be the last time someone from outside the center of the genre criticized its obvious faults and was applauded for it.
That is why the discussion about Macklemore isn’t a productive one. The issue is not with hip-hop performers, but with the cultural tastemakers who use hip-hop for their own material gain. We can probably rightly assume that Macklemore didn’t start rapping because he wanted to exploit a previous established cool while benefiting from his whiteness. However the label head, or radio executive, or whoever else profits off artists may have seen him and thought just that. From the critical embrace of jazz-rap over more aggressive subgenres, to the whitening of hip-hop culture in museums, straight through to Macklemore’s taking over the charts, hip-hop music and culture that is more palatable to whiter audiences has been highlighted over the more aggressive versions viewed as closer to the center of the genre.
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Further Reading
Chang, Jeff – Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (Picador: 2005)
Murphy, Derek Conrad – “Hip-Hop vs High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle” (Art Journal, Vol 63, No 2: 2004)
Perkins, William – Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music Hip Hop Culture (Temple University Press: 1996)
Williams, Justin – “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-hop Music” (The Journal of Musicology: 2010)
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Works Cited
Alridge, Derrick P., and James B. Stewart. “Hip-Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future.” The Journal of African American History 90.3 (2005): 190-95. JSTOR. Web.
Caramanica, Jon. “A Hip-Hop Moment, But Is It Authentic?” New York Times 20 Feb. 2013: C1. Nytimes.com. 19 Feb. 2013. Web.
Gebreamlak, Hel. “Race + Hip-Hop + LGBT Equality: On Macklemore’s White Straight Privilege.” Racialicious.com. N.p., 6 Mar. 2013. Web.
Juzwiak, Rich. “Self- Appointed Privilege Police Officer Denounces Macklemore’s Pro-Equality Anthem.” Web log post. Gawker.com. N.p., 7 Mar. 2013. Web.
Murphy, Derek C. “Hip-Hop vs. High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle.” Art Journal 63.2 (2004): 4-19. JSTOR. Web.
Soderberg, Brandon. “Stop Saying Nice Things About Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop'” Spin.com. Spin Magazine, 24 Jan. 2013. Web.
Sullivan, Rachel E. “Rap and Race: It’s Got a Nice Beat, but What About the Message?” Journal of Black Studies 33.5 (2003): 605-22. JSTOR. Web.
Williams, Justin A. “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music.” The Journal of Musicology 27.4 (2010): 435-59. Jstor. Web.
American Inequality 