Although unified by a common set of Afro-diasporic tendencies, rap music’s projections of race are neither monolithic nor static. In other words, one could say that rap is “culturally black” but that the meaning and significance of blackness (or any other racial identity projected by the genre) often varies widely from artist to artist and from song to song. The diverse constructions of racial identity explored in this book’s previous chapters depend on specific artistic decisions, including those related to how producers make beats. Ironically, by the end of the twentieth century, the same approach to working with breaks that enabled rap musicians to produce powerful soundings of blackness—from the militant nationalism of Public Enemy to the gangsta cool of Dr. Dre—also allowed whiteness to become audible. Eminem’s preemptive strike on racial authenticity and his subsequent popularity suggested one possibility for outliers wishing to create space for themselves in the genre. By lampooning various white stereotypes through his lyrics, imagery, and beats, Eminem anticipated possible criticism that he did not belong in rap. Rather than attempt to conform to generic norms, Eminem and his team of producers subverted them to emphasize the white rapper’s distance from stereotypical projections of blackness.
The success of Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP (1999) and The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) did not prove, as some observers suggest, that Eminem simply transcended race. Had race not been a factor in Eminem’s success, he should have been able to achieve commercial success with songs that avoided calling attention to his racial identity, such as those found on his independently released album, Infinite (1996).1 However, as we observed in the previous chapter, Eminem did not find widespread popularity until after he began highlighting his racial identity through lyrics, sound, and imagery. By rebelling from conventional portrayals of rap identity, Eminem rearticulated whiteness in relation to blackness, transforming his outsider status into an advantage. Following Eminem, other artists have also sought to sound race in ways that depart from common (and problematic) representations of black masculinity. Chinese American rapper Jin, for example, first flirted with fame in 2002, adopting a strategy similar to that of Eminem’s “My Name Is.” As he tried to create space for himself in the genre, however, he confronted challenges specific to his identity as an Asian American. As in the case of Eminem, Jin’s experiences negotiating race vis-à-vis blackness help illuminate the contours of rap’s racial matrix.
Born in Miami, Florida, to Cantonese-speaking parents, Jin gained notoriety via an appearance on cable television station BET’s 106 & Park program, which features a weekly “Freestyle Friday” contest pitting two MCs against each other before a live audience and a panel of judges. If a contestant manages to win seven weekly battles in a row, he (the contestants on the show have been almost exclusively male) earns a place in the show’s Hall of Fame. Jin managed to do just that, despite the fact that most of his opponents were African American men who attacked him with racial epithets and rhymed couplets that questioned his authenticity. Jin’s second opponent, Sterlin, for example, opened with a line admonishing the show’s organizers for matching him against “Bruce Lee’s grandson.”2 Further into his improvised verse, Sterlin expanded on the martial arts stereotype, claiming:
When I’m on the mic, I spit fire
He just kick and be like, “hai-ya!”
Imagining Jin as a kung fu artist, one of the stereotypical roles reserved for Asian and Asian American actors in U.S. popular culture, Sterlin implies that Jin doesn’t belong in rap. Yet, rather than attempt to change the subject and distract the audience and judges from his identity, Jin was able to flip this racial script. In the same battle with Sterlin, he opened with a rhyme that simultaneously acknowledged his race and negated each insult that had been thrown in his direction:
You wanna say I’m Chinese? Son, here’s a reminder
Check your Tims [Timberland shoes]; they probably say “Made in China”
In these two opening lines, Jin more or less sealed his victory. He owned up to being Chinese and simultaneously critiqued his opponent for relying on race in his attack. Calling attention to Sterlin’s footwear, Jin demonstrated his ability to improvise—a key element of MC battles—and reminded his audience of the ubiquity of Chinese-made products. Invoking the familiar phrase stamped onto a plethora of everyday goods, Jin creatively reimagined “Made in China” as a symbol of rap domination. By using his wits, Jin defused Sterlin’s series of racist jokes and brought the audience and panel of judges over to his side. Like Eminem’s character Rabbit in the climactic battle scene of the film 8 Mile, Jin took ownership of his racial identity in order to disarm foes and would-be critics alike.
Jin’s embrace of his outsider status was balanced by a forceful counterattack that made his audience and the judges aware of his familiarity with street slang and other hip hop tropes. Using the word “Tims” for Timberland shoes, claiming that he saw one opponent “dancing for spare change on forty-deuce [42nd Street],” and telling another that after losing to Jin, he’d find himself “at the bodega asking for swiss cheese,” Jin displayed an easy familiarity with the culture and geography of urban New York.3 Such references were especially important in establishing his credentials in these battles because of the distance between Asian American and African American stereotypes in popular culture. Popular representations of black masculinity are associated with stereotypes of athleticism, sexuality, and physical aggression that stand in polar opposition to stereotypes of the Asian American male as awkward, asexual, and passive. For these reasons, sociologist and music critic Oliver Wang argues that Asian American rappers operate from a disadvantaged position within the genre.4 To overcome this challenge, Jin did more than own up to his racial identity; he struck back to prove his “hardness,” demonstrating his mastery of masculine tropes of domination and sexual aggression. In his battle against a woefully outmatched contestant named Lucky Luciano whose rhymes sounded written (i.e., not improvised), Jin concluded his verse with a couplet that provocatively mixed gender, sexuality, and race. Illustrating once again how gender and sexuality mediate racial authenticity across the color line,5 Jin’s barb transformed typical Chinese food items into phallic symbols of sexual domination:
Ask your girlfriend; she was doing something at my house
As a matter of fact, she had my eggroll and dumplings in her mouth6
More than a defensive strategy, invoking race became a way for Jin to annihilate his opponents. The judges’ and audiences’ overwhelmingly positive reaction to this aggressive lyrical strategy suggested the potential value of a rap star capable of capitalizing on his Asian-ness. Indeed after securing his place in the “Freestyle Friday” Hall of Fame, Jin announced that he was joining Ruff Ryders Entertainment, becoming the first Asian American rapper to sign a recording contract with a major label. In crafting the lead single for his debut album The Rest Is History, Jin and producer Wyclef Jean closely paralleled Dr. Dre’s strategy for introducing Eminem to a mainstream audience.7 The single “Learn Chinese,” which was performed in English with a smattering of Cantonese lyrics, opens with Jin’s voice defiantly proclaiming, “Yeah I’m Chinese. And what?” Challenging listeners to make an issue of his racial identity, something anyone who watched him on 106 & Park would need to think carefully about doing, Jin goes on to proclaim: “The days of the pork fried rice and chicken wings coming to your house by me is over.” Conjuring the stereotypical image of Chinese food delivery—the only face-to-face encounter some of his potential audience members might have with a Chinese person—Jin makes clear that he is out to overturn common expectation. In the music video for “Learn Chinese,” Jin drives up to a single-family home and approaches the front door carrying a plastic bag presumably filled with Chinese takeout. Instead of delivering the food, however, he spits into the bag, dropping it on the porch before turning around and walking away. Like Eminem, Jin dresses up as a racial stereotype to acknowledge his identity and the challenge it poses from the start.
Although Jin faced a situation similar to white rapper Eminem vis-à-vis his distance from blackness, the particular history of Asian American exclusion and invisibility within U.S. popular culture limited his options in racially distinct ways.8 Because whiteness has been at the center of American life for years, Eminem’s flipping of rap’s racial script repositioned him at the heart of popular culture. Where Eminem could signify on whiteness, which includes a rich variety of roles from late-night television show host to The Brady Bunch, Asian rappers have a more limited set of stereotypical and demeaning representations to choose from. Because Jin could not mock Chinese-ness without running the risk of further marginalizing himself, the single and music video for “Learn Chinese” sought to make him look more like conventional representations of blackness. At one point in the song, for example, Jin refers to himself as “the original chinky-eyed MC,” adopting the racist epithet as a badge of pride in a way that parallels black MCs’ use of “nigga” as a term of endearment.9 As he did during his “Freestyle Friday” battles, Jin also demonstrates his hardness and proximity to conventional rap masculinity. Directing his second verse at an implied black audience (those who “roll dice in the ’hood”), Jin rhymes a challenge that dares listeners to “come to Chinatown” where they might “end up in the lost and found.” The music video amplifies this message, casting Jin into a world of triad gangsters who operate in a dangerous and violent Chinatown. Rather than creating a true alternative to rap’s ’hood-based authenticity, Jin merely gives it a Chinese makeover.10 Evoking longstanding stereotypes of Chinatown as a place of mystery and peril, Jin invites would-be foes to come to Chinatown, where residents only speak Chinese and will be unable to serve as “eyewitnesses,” presumably to the violence that befalls unwelcome visitors.
As if taking a cue from Dr. Dre’s work on Eminem’s “My Name Is,” producer Wyclef Jean also sought to evoke a sense of sonic otherness in “Learn Chinese.” The song’s beat includes two prominent elements that signal Jin’s racial difference. First, the backing track features a looped melody performed on a synthesizer with a twangy timbre approximating the guzheng (a stringed Chinese zither). The melody itself is an interpolation of “The Streets of Cairo,” an Orientalist Tin Pan Alley song originally published in 1895. Sometimes referred to simply as “the snake charmer song,” the melody remains well known in the U.S. as an exotic-sounding musical cliché. The other Chinese-sounding element in the song comes from an interpolation of Jamaican dancehall reggae star Yellowman’s “Mr. Chin” (1981). This song tells the story of a Chinese Jamaican storeowner and his daughter, who Yellowman claims to have seduced. The chorus to “Mr. Chin” includes a pentatonic melody that (according to Yellowman) Mr. Chin and his daughter enjoy singing. Taking advantage of the aural similarities between “Chin” and “Jin,” Wyclef Jean transformed Yellowman’s somewhat mocking song about his Chinese Jamaican neighbors into a refrain that praises the sexiness and musical skill of “Mr. Jin.” Even without knowledge of where these melodies come from, listeners familiar with U.S. popular culture can easily recognize that they are being used to evoke Jin’s racial difference. Although there are certain ironies apparent to those aware of these origins, the primary significance of these melodies in “Learn Chinese” does not stem from their original meanings or contexts. Instead, as we have witnessed repeatedly in other cases throughout this book, the end result—in this case, the pentatonic, Asian-sounding “vibe” of the beat—is what helps make Jin’s identity audible. Similarly to the way that the video portrays Jin dressed up as a triad gangster and a take-out food delivery boy, the backing track to “Learn Chinese” introduces a musical stereotype of Chinese-ness for Jin to explode with a virtuosic lyrical performance.
Unlike Eminem’s “My Name Is,” however, “Learn Chinese” did not lead to widespread commercial success or a large national following for Jin, and one could blame race for the discrepancy. As Eminem sought to establish himself as a credible rap star, his whiteness quickly went from liability to asset, a marketing advantage that the rapper has openly acknowledged in song lyrics and interviews. Given that the overwhelming majority of rap music buyers are white, Eminem’s race became a selling point in ways that Jin’s Chinese-ness never could.11 As an Asian American MC, Jin found himself marginalized at the periphery of American race relations, positioned awkwardly between the dominant poles of White and Black.12 Too racially other to attract a large white following, but not black enough to be regarded as an authentic rapper, Jin was unable, in “Learn Chinese,” to transform his racial identity into a selling point.
Although it is impossible to pinpoint exactly why Jin, a lyricist who demonstrated prodigious skills in his “Freestyle Friday” appearances, failed as a recording artist, the musical strategies behind “Learn Chinese” prove that far from becoming irrelevant, race persists as a category of identity that rap musicians negotiate in presenting themselves to the public. Although some pundits and politicians ask us to believe in a “color-blind” or “post-racial” society, developments in rap music after 2000 suggest that we remain far from such a condition. In fact, for most of the 2000s Eminem remained the exception to mainstream rap’s racially based standards of authenticity. This near-exclusive focus on artists conforming to particular modes of black representation has led scholars and activists to question whether rap still advances a progressive racial politics. Critiquing the “unholy trinity” of the black gangsta, pimp, and ho, Tricia Rose and others have roundly criticized the music industry’s unwillingness to take a chance on anything but a narrow caricature of so-called black experience.13 More attention to the formal dimensions of individual songs might help reveal noteworthy insights about the aesthetic dimensions of this body of “negative” representations.
As a concept that symbolizes social conflict by appealing to different skin colors and body types, race in rap music (as elsewhere) will continue to be meaningful as long as the experience of racial inequality remains a salient feature of U.S. life. Although observers do not always agree on exactly what music means, by sounding different identities rap songs create an index of the ongoing, unresolved problem of the color line. Does Eminem’s popularity portend a bright future in which black and white youth will more often encounter one another as equals? Or does the white rapper’s ascent signal a reassertion of white privilege based on a historic understanding of blackness? Although we ultimately need to look beyond the “music itself” to answer such questions, the discussions that people have about rap music are significantly shaped by the kinds of aesthetic decisions this book has explored. As each chapter has emphasized, a rap song’s projection of identity depends on certain formal qualities. From Grandmaster Flash to Run-D.M.C., from Public Enemy to N.W.A., from Dr. Dre to Eminem and beyond, the differences among rap’s various projections of identity highlight the socially constructed nature of race, allowing us to observe how popular culture participates in racial formation.
The case studies I have presented do not add up to a comprehensive history of rap music. Rather, each chapter has focused on a popular song by a well-known artist in order to highlight the key roles that specific musical decisions play in defining what authenticity (or inauthenticity) can sound like in the genre at a given moment in time. Unlike studies that confine their scope to words and imagery, Sounding Race has attempted a more holistic approach sensitive to the way producers and fans experience rap music as music. By exploring the production of song-level meanings in rap, I have sought increased awareness of the aesthetic processes responsible for its production of racial identity. The isolation, manipulation, and looping of breakbeats is arguably the most important and influential musical innovation of the last few decades, and I believe that a break-centered approach to analyzing rap beats can serve future projects exploring the work of other artists who have exercised creative agency within (and against) the traditions and stylistic conventions of hip hop and rap music.
These and others examples of rap music in the first decades of the twenty-first century emphasize that the articulation of sounds, images, and ideas related to race have changed significantly over time. Musical meaning in rap is not frozen in the recordings themselves, but—as in all other music—depends on its surrounding context to become intelligible. Since its earliest years as a commercial genre, rap has been a site where various understandings of racial difference vie to be heard. Although practices of production and listening might change over time, understanding how rap becomes meaningful to listeners will require attention to music at the level of the song. Far from any single essentialized racial meaning, rap music reflects and helps construct the diversity of identities we encounter in this world; it is a sonic force helping us understand the meaning of our existence and our relationship to others. Exploring specific artistic decisions and paying attention to stylistic difference in the genre, we can continue to analyze and interpret how producers work with breaks to creatively recombine and reimagine ideas from the past in hitherto unrecognized ways.