I think a lot of us white people have moments where we realize just how white we are. For me, it happened Saturday morning, when I woke up in the new place, looked across the alley, and saw a man hosing down his garage floor. Not even power-washing it. Just an old guy, a garage, and a hose. This is the neighborhood into which I’ve settled.
Yesterday, I was in the car for a bit, and I decided to listen to the new-ish Jack Harlow album. The one from a few weeks ago. Jackman. I liked it! But I have to confess.
The reason I listened to the new-ish Jack Harlow album yesterday is that I know absolutely nothing about rap. I don’t even know what to call it. Hip hop? This might be a revealing question but…R&B? My thought process was: 1) Thanks to his frequent mentioning of college basketball players, I can identify more with Jack Harlow than with any other rapper besides a) Lin-Manuel Miranda and b) that friend of a friend who went viral rapping as an Uber driver six or seven years ago; 2) Spotify generally recommends stuff I like in those “[insert artist or song] Radio” playlists, so maybe I just needed an on-ramp. It’s possible that it was a good thought process. Whether it is or isn’t, though, has this not been a disturbingly Caucasian paragraph? ‘I didn’t know how to get into rap so I listened to an album by a white guy from Louisville in the hopes I’d like it and a 30-billion-dollar company would then guide me to more rap I like.’
This is a real issue for me. I want to know more about rap—partially because I like some of it, partially because it’s useful if you’re blogging to a basketball-fan readership—and I don’t know how to learn. I’m great at finding artists similar to Jason Isbell and I’m great at finding up-and-coming female pop stars, but if you ask me my favorite rapper I will burrow up into a cocoon of fear. It’s not just that I don’t know. It’s that I don’t want to be revealed, and that I’m worried my answer could be straight-up offensive, like when my high school buddy Jake told a Grateful Dead fan his favorite Counting Crows song was ‘Friend of the Devil.’ I can’t keep up with who people think is good and who people think is bad. Was there a moment when people didn’t like Childish Gambino, the rapper I know because he wrote and co-starred in an NBC sitcom with a cult following? Did Chance the Rapper have a moment where people were out on him? Who did that song about putting cocaine in Miley Cyrus’s butt?
The hip hop world, to me, is like my neighbor’s life. Every now and then, I run into it, but I only find out what’s going on at that moment, so I don’t know how representative that moment is, and if I try too directly to find out I feel like a creep.
Big Tech and Peyton Siva references, please save me.
