The Black and White of Hip Hop Criticism

If you are good at concealing laughter and contempt, you should ask a white person about “Real Hip Hop.” They will quickly tell you about how they don’t listen to “Commercial Hip Hop” (aka music that black people actually enjoy), and that they much prefer “Classic Hip Hop.”

“I don’t listen to that commercial stuff. I’m more into the Real Hip Hop, you know? KRS One, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, De La Soul, Wu Tang, you know, The Old School.”

Calling this style of music ‘old school’ is considered an especially apt name since the majority of people who listen to it did so while attending old schools such as Dartmouth, Bard, and Williams College.

-- A post on StuffWhitePeopleLike.com

Is OnHipHop that guy?

We are white. We grew up in a wealthy suburb. We went to an Ivy League school. We love hip hop, and write about it using words like “ambivalence” and “anachronistic.”

And yet, we don't think we're “that guy.” We don’t listen to early hip hop to pretend like it gives us some modicum of “street cred.” We don’t spontaneously recite Tupac lyrics and pretend to be from “the hood.” We simply listen to whatever hip hop we want to listen to because we like the way it makes us feel.

That being said, this passage from StuffWhitePeopleLike points out an important truth. Hip hop is, with several notable exceptions, created by black musicians, many of whom grew up with little material wealth. At the same time, hip hop is consumed in large part by white kids from middle- and upper-class suburbs.

As such, does OnHipHop erroneously – and arrogantly – presume that we can intelligently comment on hip hop? And, for that matter, might the same be said of high-brow publications like the New York Times and Slate, which regularly print reviews of hip hop albums next to columns on the New York Phil? (Last week, the Times’s Jon Caramanica classified Lil’ Wayne as an “abstract expressionist.” In Lil’ Wayne’s often boastful songs, this is definitely not one of the phrases he uses to describe himself.)

The answer to this question may very well be yes. There is much about Lil’ Wayne’s upbringing that OnHipHop does not pretend to understand. He was carrying a gun to school by the time he was a teenager and fathered a child by the time he was 14. Without fully understanding the experiences that shaped the man, how can we fully understand Lil’ Wayne’s artistic output?

But by the same logic, how can scholars presume to understand the music of Beethoven, who was completely deaf for much of his life and may have also suffered from bipolar disorder. How can critics analyze the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, who was driven so far into madness that he attempted to cut his ear off? How can we pretend to comprehend these artists’ works, when these works were byproducts of lives so different from our own?

Ultimately, critics cannot satisfactorily answer this question. They must simply do their best to understand and empathize with the artist, and try to set their own biases aside.