According to both Chuck D and Ice T, White youngsters as early as 1995 were buying between fifty and seventy percent of the rap music being sold.[i] In 2007, Republican mastermind Karl Rove appeared at the White House Correspondents Dinner as MC Rove, doing an inept minstrel hip-hop dance routine as comedians mocked/lauded his criminal prowess. In 2013, Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke offered their version of twerking at an awards ceremony.
What’s that all about!?
From the streets and house parties of New York in the late seventies emerged a community of athletic breakdancers, bold graffiti artists, innovative record-scratchers and rhyming verbal improvisers. The rap artists broke through the resistance of the music industry and surfaced a new style from the underground, drawing on Jamaican “toasting” DJ’s, African-American verbal traditions, funk, rock, reggae and James Brown.
One of the first rapping DJ’s was Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), who came to the Bronx from Jamaica, where party DJs shouted out their neighbors’ names with catchy rhymes over the records. Herc named the breakdancers b-boys (and later b-girls). He and his Bronx crowd also began to abbreviate names—Easy-E, Ice-T—and all kinds of words, whether they were giving props (proper respect) or diss(respect)ing. All of this was poured into the mix that poured out of the Bronx.
Once again a new Black music was feared and condemned by the mainstream. Rap was castigated for its violence and misogyny, which it certainly has had, in bulk. Of course many feared it because it’s Black and often angry, and many simply can’t countenance the supremacy of rhythm over melody. Some say rap regenerated poetry. It brought back rhyme with a vengeance, stuffing rhymes internally anywhere they would fit, and then some, and soon, spoken rhyme sections were inserted in otherwise non-rap songs by all manner of rock artists. It has kicked language alive, flooding the mainstream with vernacular. Allen Ginsberg was enthusiastic about rap’s prospects:
This movement is a great thing: the human voice returns, words return, nimble speech returns, nimble wit and rhyming return…It serves to cultivate an interest in the art by cultivating a great audience—an audience of amateur practitioners.[ii]
Some scoff and many denigrate, but if rap were set to music that old-timers are more familiar with, it might draw appreciation from the nay-sayers; Leonard Bernstein once demonstrated this principle in reverse by singing lines from Macbeth as a blues.
♬SUBSTITUTION: Choose some rap lyrics and sing to your favorite jazz, blues, bluegrass (rapgrass) or any other instrumental record. In your head, rap them to your favorite Willie Nelson or Gilbert and Sullivan song. Go ‘head, no one’s listening.
Diverse strains continue to evolve, with various politics; female rappers liberate the form from its male dominators. As rap mutates, it carries on debates on many social questions—debates other genres might should aspire to. Certainly rap is in your face—although there is all manner of Rap Lite. Rap The Whole Office Can Enjoy (Rapzak) can’t be far off.**
Following the tremendous growth in the White audience for rap came an increase in the number of White rappers. The scope of opinion on what has been happening with, to, and by rap is as wide and wild as it was on any previous Black crossover music, from minstrelsy on. Let’s look, briefly, at some of the cultural moments that have been crucial in the diffusion of this latest subcultural music in society, and remain so with hip-hop: the roots, the crossover artists and audience, the “mainstream” artists, and the industry, including media. We’ll follow this with an examination of some of the logics behind White rap fandom.
The Roots
Inspired by Kool Herc’s import of toasting[1] from Jamaica to the South Bronx, Afrika Bambattaa, Grandmaster Flash, and others in New York put together sound systems and the skills to match. Rapping evolved from a few toasts to extended boasts. But the multi-cultural aspects of rap’s roots are worth a moment here. First of all, the music was part of a larger artistic scene that included graffiti artists and breakdancing, which prominently featured Puerto Rican youth. Second, there were a few key White figures in the industry—not at the point of origin, but not far behind.
[1] Rapping/rhyming over records.
First of these, or nearly first, was Rick Rubin. The White Jewish punk rocker from Long Island co-founded Def Jam Records in 1984 (with Russell Simmons), which he ran for a time out of his NYU dorm room. He promoted Public Enemy as well as the Beastie Boys, a White punk band turned rappers. In one of the first crossover acts, he added distorted guitars on Run-DMC records. Was he the John Hammond of rap? Sort of.
A few women rose to important positions: Sylvia Robinson, a singer turned producer in Englewood, New Jersey, put together the Sugar Hill Gang, who had the first commercial hit rap record with “Rapper’s Delight.” Then came Monica Lynch, president of Tommy Boy Music, a rap label producing Queen Latifah, De La Soul, and Naughty By Nature, among others. Lynch came up in the seventies and failed to click with rock. Hip-hop was more receptive, as an industry, to women working in it—a paradox, given the initial and persistent male domination on the artist side. Maybe the alternative/outlaw nature of the genre and its record companies was more conducive to the inclusion of women than the corporate labels; in any case, she was accepted not only as a woman, but, as she noted later, “I didn’t really get any beef about the fact that I was white, either.”[iii] Lynch was responsible for some of the progress of women in the field, shying away from signing “bitch baiters” to the label. And she gets respect: Shock-G of Digital Underground called her “more a homegirl than an exec.”[iv]
Without puffing up the role of Whites in the nascent business, we can say that there certainly was White interest in the form’s development early on. Recall here the White backup musicians at Stax/Volt in Memphis in the sixties and the involvement of Leiber and Stoller as songwriters for the Coasters. Abbott’s music integration principle, again.
Outside interest always raises the question of diffusion vs. defusion: Is the music spreading out and taking over, or is it being watered down and outright pilfered? Most often the answer is both. But the relationships in the processes are tricky, and judgment of the results varies widely. Alongside the triumph of rap and its dilution/cooptation lies the general transformation of pop music by the sensibilities of hip-hop. Such metamorphoses are often subtle and not always acknowledged. Like the nineties teenager who couldn’t hear the blues in the Stones, we have now a newly hybridized, hip-hopped mainstream pop music in which some White folks already can’t hear the hip-hopping.
Crossover Artists
The key early link was between rap and metal. Run-DMC recorded “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith in 1986; later Anthrax covered Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noize,” with PE’s Chuck D guesting on the mike. The first of these deals was put together by Rick Rubin, but in the case of the second, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian had been hanging around the PE record office years before. He loved what PE was doing—pioneering the metal style in rap, among other things. Chuck was reluctant at first to collaborate, but eventually he waxed it, and waxed enthusiastic.[v]
Run-DMC went on the road with the Beasties, and PE with White rock/punk bands like Sisters of Mercy and Gang of Four. Other collaborations included Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols in 1984, The Fat Boys and the Beach Boys in 1987, Sonic Youth and Chuck D in 1990, and R.E.M. and KRS-One in 1991. Ice-T formed a metal band, Body Count, responsible for the much-heralded song “Cop Killer” of 1992. Nashville’s racially mixed rock/rap band The Hard Corps boasted production by Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay; 24-Spyz released a metal-rap record; and Vallejo, California rapper B-Legit cut a record with Daryl Hall.
An important crossover mechanism has been the adaptation by Black pop acts of rap to their own styles. Sometimes this takes the form of a rap interlude by a guest artist, as with Grandmaster Melle Mel’s contribution to Chaka Khan’s “I Feel For You” (1984). Another intermediary role has been played by Chicano acts, including Kid Frost (“Hispanic Causing Panic”); Cubans like Melloman Ace and Skatemaster Tate; other Latino groups including Cypress Hill, the Beatnuts, and Fat Joe; and Samoans like the Boo Yaa Tribe, who grew up in southeast LA. There was also the production outfit Soul Assassins, which worked with the Italian Grandmixer Muggs, Chicano B-Real, and Cuban Sen Dogg. They went to number one on the pop charts in 1993 with Black Sunday. But wait, it gets better: Soul Assassins also produced FunkDoobiest, a Puerto Rican-Sioux-Mexican mix.[vi] All this helped turn hip-hop into a voice for “women, Chicano, Asian, Irish, gay, and all the variants covered by Black Jamaican, Dominican, etc.”[vii]
An Italian rapper called rap “rediscovering the tribal rhythms of our ancestors.”[viii] There’s German rap, and Russian, and Mexican. Afrika Bambaataa established a racially mixed hip-hop organization in Paris in the mid-eighties.[ix] The Dutch group Urban Dance Squad put out Life ‘N Perspectives Of A Genuine Crossover. In Brazil, laid-back samba rap competed with harder stuff from Sao Paolo, served up by groups with names like Sons of the Ghetto. In Cuba, rap is rampant. Also in Israel, and Palestine too. Given the worldwide diffusion of previous trends in African-American culture, we cannot be surprised by the planetary spread of rap and associated styles.
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THE DOZENS, WITH STRINGS
A parallel from south of the border (with Brazil): Throughout the 19th century and down to today, Afro-Argentines have matched musical wits in the ritual duel of guitarist-singers, payada, a competition with roots in Iberia as well as central Africa.
Think of it as the dozens with a dozen strings. Or— obviously—a rap battle. The great payador Gabino Ezeida famously defeated his challenger in a two-day battle in 1894 with this final stanza, translated as:
I see no equality
in this here rink
I improvise, simply and quickly,
you have to sit down and think.[x]
“Living in verses,” said Thompson,” “Ezeida would not be matched in this hemisphere until 1940s calypso and 1990s rap.” The tradition continues.[xi]
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Hip-Hop In Morocco
One couldn’t concoct a better lab experiment than the case of the White rap fans at the high school in Morocco, Indiana. Hardly a Black face to be found in town, yet these teens, out of sheer boredom, find hip-hop style and climb aboard.[xii] Offended by their outfits of flannel shirts, headbands, and baggy shorts, fellow students yell “wiggers!” (White niggers) and attack, as school officials stand by. There’s an undertow [sic] of White girls gone Black here, as in Black man gonna get your sister, that might help explain the vehemence of the response. Sure enough, two young African-American fellas from Lafayette—nearby in geography only—cruise on up and help the kids get their clothes, music, and haircuts right. It all reminds me of Buddy Holly’s encounter, real or merely cinematic, with a recording engineer who dissed him for playing “that nigger music.” When Holly’s mother asked him if he got along with the Black bands on tour, he responded “Oh we’re Negroes too. We get to feeling like that’s what we are.”[xiii] Holly lived in the era of Norman Mailer’s “White Negroes,” hipsters who saw Black culture as the only way out of the white bread ghetto. In some places, and some places in the mind, that era continues. Or perhaps everywhere.
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The White Artists
As hip-hop diffused through the mainstream, it became naturalized: it makes “common sense” for anyone to rap, just as it has long made sense for anyone to rock, from Bill Clinton to Lee Atwater to Bart Simpson. And then there were the Lawrences: “just your ordinary middle-aged Jewish couple ‘n the hood,” on the downside of an insurance-brokerage tax evasion debacle, waxing tracks on the Upper East Side and shooting video of themselves giving away turkeys to the homeless in Harlem. Lauren Lawrence, rap name Infidel, carried a $5,000 Hermès purse and rapped about her “Terrorist Lover.”[xiv]
In 1985, producer Maurice Starr taught New Kids on the Block to sing and dance “Black.” In 1992, New Kids member Donnie Wahlberg’s brother Marky Mark did the act with Black folks added to the set. Vanilla Ice was the great White hope for a New York minute. His promo material was full of exciting personal stuff, like stabbings for instance, that later turned out to be fanciful. His handlers got him a posse of Black dancers, and he even drove through Harlem once.[xv] He did in fact grow up on reggae and soul. Was he Elvis? Or just Pat Boone?[2] And who was Debbie Harry of Blondie when she released “Rapture,” the first alleged rap record to top the pop charts?[xvi] All this conjures up “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the Irving Berlin song that provoked the ragtime explosion of 1911: the song was ragtime in name only.
[2] Ice in fact paid no royalties to his Black producer, Mario Johnson,
who wrote the music for his hit, until after the courts forced him to. (Rose, 12)
The Beastie Boys sold four million copies of Licensed to Ill in 1986. Street scholars differ on their merits; Run-DMC they weren’t. On the other hand, Vanilla Ice they weren’t either. They were picked up by Capitol in 1988. Then there were the Young Black Teenagers, produced by top African-American rap producer Hank Shocklee (Public Enemy, Ice Cube). They were White, but down, at least with what they called “the hip-hop mentality”—and they didn’t claim to be the originators.[xvii] Their song: “Proud to Be Black.”[3] Too bad they didn’t tour with The Average White Band. And Third Bass felt African American enough to join in the dissing of Hammer for not being street enough.[xviii] House of Pain, an Irish group, had a Latvian DJ. Their album: Fine Malt Lyrics. And the Irish-Canadian rapper Snow, who grew up street-fighting and parroting the accents in a Jamaican neighborhood in Toronto, got airplay in Jamaica. Heavily influenced by dancehall reggae, he performed with Jamaican DJs.[xix]
[3] Their producer said of them, “It’s rock ‘n’ roll all over again.”
Except that, today, everyone knows rap is Black.
(“The Kids Are All White,” Mother Jones, Sept-Oct 1991.)
In the new millennium came Country Rap. Not the mellow Tennessee variant of the African American group Arrested Development, but White southern male artists performing “hick-hop”[4] at dirt road festivals attended by proud self-styled rednecks. Despite the prevalence of confederate flags, there are a few Black performers and attendees. The racial politics of the participants are all over the map, and often lean toward the inchoate and self-contradictory. My take-away is that once again, Whites are adopting the prevalent music of their era and ignoring its roots.[xx] Prove me wrong.
[4] One rapper who rejects the hick-hop tag is Struggle Jennings, grandson of Waylon.
The Industry
Certainly a driving force behind crossover, if not the most important, was the medium of diffusion: can you spell MTV? Originally so resistant to Blacks that Herbie Hancock kept his face out of his video to ensure airplay, they did an about-face with Michael Jackson.[xxi] Not initially—”Billie Jean” wasn’t big enough. It took “Beat It” to beat the system, or to join it.
But a whole generation of stars was made by video, and many of them played the demographics of the medium to a T, creating borderline identities calculated for crossover. George Michael, Boy George, Prince, and Michael Jackson—maybe, as MJ said, it doesn’t matter what you are. But all of them were heavily influenced by hip-hop—if not at the start, then of necessity somewhere along the line.
In any case, MTV’s rap show broke out of its late night ghetto and became the site to see, the place to be to find out what was going on at the cutting edge. MTV was also responsible for the dissemination of rap-rock collaborations that couldn’t be contained in any genre-specific hour. And they may have been partly responsible for the inclusion of Ice Cube, Arrested Development, and A Tribe Called Quest in Lollapalooza.
Rapper/dancer Hammer was even morphed into a Saturday morning cartoon. This was a watershed: after all, if it’s ok for the toddlers, it must be ok for everyone. Hammer might have seemed harmless, and critics might say his rap had been bled dry, but culture moves like a caterpillar: the back jams up against the front, poises in mid-air, and the front is forced forward.
Radio continued to drag its feet. When “modern rock” stations played rap, they favored White artists, often playing rock tunes with rap mixed in.[xxii] Of course there’s been resistance to rap on Black radio as well, and for some of the same reasons: “This music very rudely pulls them [the audience] back on the street corner, and they don’t want to go.”[xxiii]
Underclasses habitually create new artistic forms that vent their spleen (openly or otherwise), define their identity, and unite them in that identity against their dominators. A moment occurs in the cycle of rebellious creativity when the existing social-cultural-economic system recoups its losses from the rebellion, a process of recuperation. It operates through the conversion of subversive sentiments and their signs and signals into commodities. Certainly this has happened with rap.
But is there something different here? There’s an unprecedented amount of artistic and financial control being retained by the artists and their posses. Equally important, the White kids are not—with some exceptions—going for the watered down version, the White copy.[5] They’re going with the original. This can be interpreted in several ways, many of them compatible and overlapping.
[5] Michael Bernard-Donals asserts a pivotal role for certain off-beat intellectuals who “canonize the margins.” Mailer and Kerouac, he argues, helped transform the African-American bebop scene into a university course topic. New material washes up at the margins, to be colonized by culturally displaced Whites, and later canonized again.
White Kids On Rap: Why?
The first explanation for this fandom is that rap speaks to White youth. Lawrence Grossberg opined that the difference between White middle class youth from the sixties and the nineties was that in the sixties they wanted to be Black, and a generation later they felt that they were.[xxiv] He chalks this up to economic and social changes that caused youth in general to be targeted as an enemy, as African-Americans have always been. His contention has been confirmed by teens of my acquaintance. Sandy, a sixteen year-old White female who attended a racially mixed high school in the 90s, explained,
There’s a common thread between kids of all races of this generation. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of fear, and a lot of need for aggressive actions to the rest of the world, to say “Hello, I am here, and I need some help, and you guys are really screwin’ up where I have to live when I grow up.[xxv]
But the pull of hip-hop could also be chalked up to the cyclical American routine of Black innovation/White imitation. Rap is the biggest musical sea-change since rock and roll, and once again, White youth crossed the tracks.
This is the auspicious side. In 1992 Newsweek interviewed a group of Black and White teenagers, with encouraging results. Said John, an African-American teenager, about White fans, “When positive rappers talk about police brutality…or how they go for an interview and they automatically see you’re black so you’re not going to get this job—when white people hear about this…it helps bring people to unite more.” Dan, a White student, added, “I’ll be singing, and there’ll be a Hispanic kid, black kid, we’ll all be singing the same song.” Jessica chimed in that when the White kids are listening to “N.W.A. or whatever, they’ll have a black friend with them, bopping their head along with them and just chilling with them.”[xxvi]
All these comments reflect positive contact, music boosting people over racial barriers. In the case of White youth who sincerely want to befriend their Black peers, rap became an opening, or an extra boost.
There’s always a yearning among some non-Black youth to get a purchase on some part of the black experience, a desire for “listening in on black culture” in Tricia Rose’s words.[xxvii] The records may or may not be authentic stories—they may be constructed to appear so by “studio gangsters”[xxviii]—but White youth imagine they’re contacting the Black experience, with the help of the industry. White performers can never fill the same need. And of course not everyone’s happy about this, or ever has been. As Greg Tate framed it,
African Americans are the cotton-picking base on which Western capitalism stands. We built this country twice over, first economically, then culturally, and remain an exploited and second-class citizenry. Tell me how much a white American loves our music and all I can think [is] look what they done to my song, ma.[xxix]
Granting all that, it’s also the case that rap captures the despair and cynicism of the age—faces them down, in fact—which is a dirty job somebody’s gotta do. That has an attraction for youth facing a morbid future.
Even though there’s a strong tendency to go for the harder stuff, there’s a parallel propensity to be pulled into rap through the “nicer” artists like Fresh Prince and Salt ‘n’ Pepa and the Beasties..[xxx] There’s lots of anger in rap, but there are other emotions. Some artists are intellectual and politically analytical, some are bouncy and lighthearted, some appeal more through sex than through violence. Some of them might pull the pre-teen and post-twenty-five sets, middle class listeners, and various subsets of women as well. Many listeners start with acts like De La Soul or Arrested Development and move on to embrace the tougher stuff, as was the case with White listeners with many previous forms of Black popular music.
Meanwhile, what is the particular appeal of women rappers to non-Black audiences? Hazel Carby asked “why black women…are needed as cultural and political icons by the white middle class at this particular moment?” She was speaking of Zora Neale Hurston, but I think of Beyonce (or Oprah) when she ventures that
the black female subject is frequently the means by which many middle-class white students and faculty cleanse their souls and rid themselves of the guilt of living in a society that is still rigidly segregated.[xxxi]
And more generally,
Black cultural texts have become fictional substitutes for the lack of any sustained social or political relationships with Black people…[xxxii]
This brings us to the minstrelsy interpretation: some say that the purveyance of gangsta rap in particular is aimed at White youth who want confirmation of their worst stereotypes of Blacks. It’s also arguable that even if it’s not so designed, it has the same effect.[xxxiii] David Samuels laid out the minstrelsy theory at length in the authoritative hip-hop journal The New Republic in 1991. To his ears, “The Message,” the seminal political rap record, was a calculated ploy to reach Dylan-bred Whites; “Fight the Power” a mere college hit; and “Fuck the Police” a “constant presence at certain college parties, white and black.” Samuels calls White fascination with rap “cultural tourism” and quotes Henry Louis Gates comparing it to “buying Navajo blankets at a reservation road-stop.”
My informant Sandy worried about this too:
I know a lot of white kids who I, in my mind, think, “Oh, they listen to rap, therefore they must be open-minded,” and yet they have all these stereotypes about Black people all living in ghettoes and walking around with guns in their pants. And I think stereotypes are easier. If you’re worried that all the Black people out there are gonna shoot you, that’s a really good reason to stay away from them, and you’ll never have to get to know anybody different from you.
This undoubtedly happens, yet it also happens that Black cultural production is routinely conducted in the fabled dual consciousness mode: artists know that Whites are hot for their “soul,” but they’re aiming at a Black audience as well. If it’s possible to fashion the product for the home audience without losing the mainstream bucks, they’ll do it. It’s a thin line to walk, even thinner than the one walked by folk artists who go pop, Country artists who go Nashville, etc.
Some in the industry may be aiming at White ears purely for the cash, making no particular attempt to exacerbate the Zip Coon presentation. “We’re marketing black culture to white people,” said MTV jock André Brown in 1992. Why do they buy? KRS-One reasoned that “Right now everybody needs the ‘pure black’ to help them feel relaxed.”[xxxiv] That’s an interesting choice of words; to me, “relaxed” implies at home. Do some Whites feel naturally more at home with Black music, or is it a mediating force that temporarily and partially resolves racial tension in society? It certainly is an easy way to connect, as the critic said of listening to “race records” in 1928, “without bothering the Negroes.”
Then there’s the pull of the beat, to the exclusion of the words and whatever worldviews go with them. I once stood a few feet from the “two-tone” reggae band UB40 as they explained the background of their song about Gary Tyler, a Black prisoner in Louisiana who proclaimed his innocence of a murder rap. They explained, they sang, the kids around me sang along, but they sang from memory, seemingly ignoring the intro, the point, and the prisoner.[xxxv] That was my subjective impression. It’s amazing what pop music can do. And not do. As Greg Tate said, sharing everything except the burden.
Rap replaced hard rock, punk, metal, and grunge as the aural expression of rebellion. All these forms are verboten at the office—”rock without the edge” is as edgy as it gets there. A radio station in Philadelphia built an entire ad campaign for itself around its “no-rap workday.”[xxxvi]
Perhaps some people are down with the beat, and maybe the poetics, and ignore deeper levels of meaning. One can argue that even so, it’s a positive thing for Whites to gravitate to Black music. But then, of course, the less conscious the kids are of the context, the more they’ll con the text and grow up to perpetuate racism in their own ways, perhaps more subtly than their parents’. One White teen rap fan reports on a friend of his who is “sickeningly prejudiced,” yet listens to rap. He enjoys the guns and violence.[xxxvii]
Back To The Tracks
You can’t really issue a cover version of a rap, though you can steal a style. Of course in a lot of rap the music is almost all covered—sampled, that is. But as for the words, when you step up to the mike, you better have something to say and your own way to say it. It would be hard to copy the voices that echo
African griots, black preachers, Apollo DJs, Birdland MCs, Muhammed Ali, black streetcorner males’ signifying, oratory of the Nation of Islam, and get-down ghetto slang.[xxxviii]
Still, some will always try, copying everything but the burden.
Finally, there might be another, more particularly American-historical element: Michael Dyson noted that gangsta rap “draws its metaphoric capital in part from the mix of myth and murder that gave the Western frontier a dangerous appeal a century ago.”[xxxix] Is the inner city the final frontier? Or are the relations among our multiple sub-cultures now the frontiers where hybrids are constantly created, moving us more and more in the direction of a common culture? Cultures never move in only one direction, as we’ve seen from the contradictory uses White folks have made of hip-hop. Looking on the dark side, there’s a continuation of manipulation and of privileged young folks grabbing culture from others. On the brighter side, as Gregory Stephens suggests, “we ought to be proud that black grooves are writing the basslines to a new multicultural song.”
[i] Rose, 187.
[ii] Gates, New Yorker, 40.
[iii] Light, Vogue.
[iv] ibid.
[v] Ressner, Rolling Stone.
[vi] Garofalo, 422.
[vii] Cross, 58.
[viii] Cocks, Time.
[ix] Shusterman, Critical Inquiry.
[x] Beatriz Seibel, ed., El Cantar del Payador, 1998. Buenos Aires:Biblioteca de Cultura Popular, 45.
[xi] Thompson, 95
[xii] E. Jean Carroll, Esquire.
[xiii] Lipsitz 1990, 122.
[xiv] Kaplan, New York, 46.
[xv] Handelman, Rolling Stone.
[xvi] Garofalo, 412.
[xvii] Brown, Mother Jones.
[xviii] Baker, 223.
[xix] N. Jennings, Maclean’s.
[xx] David Peisner, “Backwoods Rhymes,” Rolling Stone, January 11, 2018, 15-17.
[xxi] Leland, Newsweek.
[xxii] Rosen, Billboard.
[xxiii] Henderson, Billboard, R-21.
[xxiv] Interview with author, October, 1996.
[xxv] Interview with author, December, 1996.
[xxvi] Leland, ibid.
[xxvii] Tricia Rose, 5.
[xxviii] Dyson, 163.
[xxix] Tate, 102.
[xxx] Danaher, Popular Music and Society.
[xxxi] Carby, Black Popular Culture, 192.
[xxxii] loc. cit.
[xxxiii] Leland, ibid.
[xxxiv] Leland, ibid.
[xxxv] I didn’t interview them but I’m pretty sure.
[xxxvi] Baker, 222.
[xxxvii] Leland, ibid.
[xxxviii] Baker, 221.
[xxxix] Dyson, 185.