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October 27, 2003
Bling Eye for the White Guy
been fascinated for a long time by this: quite a few black and Latino rappers fill their albums and videos with images of ostentatious, even cartoonish wealth. With the possible exception of Vanilla Ice rolling in his 5.0*, I’ve never seen a white rapper portray his success in a remotely similar way.
First of all, white rappers don’t get rich, relatively speaking. Secondly, flossing bling is just a genre of rap. It’s here today, it will be gone tomorrow. Thirdly and distinct from the flossing bling, there is a ghetto fabulous fashion statement that a lot of artists indulge. But most important is that black artists and producers are crowing about something they’ve only recently been able to, their own money.
It may surprise folks, but rappers like Coolio and several others have donated tens of thousands to the Republican party in order to crash their affairs. These are the exceptions proving the rule that there are separate royalties in American celebrityhood for blacks and whites, and it’s the rare black star who gets play on both sides of the line.
This gets back to what’s ghetto fabulous. Black stars find out quick fast and in a hurry what it feels like to hit the glass cieling of celebrity in America which are not devoid of racist stereotypes. You are a black NBA star, therefore you are not expected to date Hollywood starlets and show up at the Emmys, etc.
What Dr. Dre had to do to break into Hollywood films was to essentially disown all of gangsta. He masterfully played the politics of the game directly in the wake of NWA’s Fuck the Police. Suddenly it was OK to have rap songs in Hollywood films. You can split up the film industry’s treatment of hiphop into pre- and post-Dre. The movement is still not complete.
My point is that the entertainment industry is still wrestling with the fact that black artists and producers are making big money after its entire history of exclusion and ripoff.
Every black hiphop artist on the planet hates Elvis Presley and spends massive amounts of energy to avoid being one person: Little Richard. Every self-referential message in rap records about which producer and crew is on wax in ‘03 (going back to ‘89) is a spit in the eye of White Mr. Money-Minder and the old-boy network of the music industry.
The Hollywood Hills are littered with hundreds of white has-beens and also-rans who bathe in past glory or languish in relative obscurity. But chances are that when they head down from their mansions in their old Jags and Benzos they don't have to hassle with the Beverly Hills PD. But old black entertainment money is elsewhere. This is the first generation to have multi-ethnic success of this sort, but it's still very different.
When black money in entertainment is big enough and works like everybody's else, when the word 'crossover' disappears... hmph.. why am I even predicting?
Posted by mbowen at October 27, 2003 12:30 PM
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