Comparisons, be it with athletes, politicians, musicians or anyone else, are an integral part of our society. When someone or something appears before us that we have no experience with, we grasp at familiarities that might help us understand the unknown. Before this editorial turns into some sort of weird psychobabble science lecture, let me get to my point.
White rappers seem to be flourishing in this current rap climate. Yelawolf is a part of the mighty Shady Records. Mac Miller’s debut album is about to drop. Machine Gun Kelly is a Bad Boy. Ritz, a heavy set, bearded emcee who raises mischief with Yela, is just starting to get some shine. Music journalists (or below average ones at least) find themselves in a pickle. Besides Eminem, there are no other prominent white emcees from yesteryear that these writers can conjure up to figure out just who these new batch of whiteys sounds like. So, not wanting to do any time consuming and grueling research (if I read this sentence aloud you could hear the sarcastic tone I’m trying to emit), these writers find some way, any way to slide an Eminem reference into their stories about these youngsters.
Yelawolf sounds nothing like Eminem. In fact, Yelawolf sounds like absolutely nobody in the game right now. With his strong southern drawl and off kilter flow, what makes Yelawolf so intriguing is so few people have heard anything like him. But since he is signed to Shady, the easy, lazy route to take is drop one of the most cliche lines in hip-hop journalism: “Is he the next Eminem?” That line bothered Asher Roth so much he wrote an entire song about it on his first album. Machine Gun Kelly doesn’t sound like Eminem either. Nor does he sound like Yelawolf. Sure, they both enjoy rapping a mile a minute for spurts. And yes, they both sport a ton of tattoos. And yes, they are both white. But the intricacies of their flows are so different, as is their subject matter. Yela spits about growing up in the deep south and the culture that surrounded it. Kelly, residing thousands of miles away, raps intimately about his personal life and his penchant for raging. No individual with an eardrum would ever mistake a Yelawolf song for a Machine Gun Kelly song. Mac Miller’s raspy voice and smooth rhymes don’t come close to Eminem’s subject matter of murder, homophobia and general debauchery. That’s the beauty of good hip-hop. These new white rappers may have borrowed aspects of their style from other emcees, but their voice is their own. It’s like J. Cole says on Sideline Story:
“You never play me like LeBron versus Jordan/20 years running who they gon’ say was more important?/Both changed the game, came through and made a lane/Who’s to say that who’s greater all we know is they ain’t the same.”
So this is a call to all music journalists. Let white rappers live. None of them sound like Em, and most of them will probably never approach Em’s ability or legend. But they are all talented in their own right, and stripping their styles down to just “trying to be the next Eminem” takes away their originality and individuality. Let’s get this fixed.
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