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Can hip-hop be middle class?
Loading ...I spent the whole of Asher Roth’s first song on Later … With Jools Holland last week wondering just what I was watching. The preppy young white American primly asking for crowd participation simply did not compute. Roth was apparently a rapper. Yet he couldn’t be further from the gangsta stereotype represented by bullet-riddled 50 Cent if he was on the moon. Roth’s recent debut hit was called “I Love College”, and he is defiantly, obviously suburban. In a genre where the unspoken fault-line was always race, till Eminem detonated it, Roth offers hip-hop’s next challenge. Can music born in the devastated Bronx ghetto ever really be middle-class?
The short answer is that a star like Roth was inevitable. Hip-hop’s audience has been largely white and middle-class for almost 20 years. Ironically, both the cause and effect of this has been the vicarious thrill of black gangsta rap’s sex and violence. The social conscience of early rap records has always remained. But it has been coarsened by the lure of the mass wealth waiting in the white mainstream, where fans listen wide-eyed to ever more fanciful tales of drug-dealing, rape and slaughter. Ever since Niggaz With Attitude (NWA) hit this commercial motherlode in the late 1980s, social protest has been outgunned by dark and dirty, sometimes wittily extreme equivalents to Hollywood gangster epics such as Scarface. The wider the gap between such tales and the everyday life of white US college kids, the deeper the frisson, and the higher the sales. Ice-T portrayed the trade-off neatly on the sleeve of his 1993 LP Home Invasion. It pictured a white suburban boy in his bedroom, with Iceberg Slim and Malcolm X books by his side, dreaming of a scantily clad white woman, maybe his mum, being grabbed roughly from behind by one darkly masked man, while another murdered a white man who might be his dad. The boy’s records, like his drugs no doubt, were teenage kicks supplied by black kids a universe away.
Roth could be that kid. But he offers a very different angle. The 23-year-old is from Morrisville, Pennsylvania, a sleepy suburb of “trees and quiet streets, and people going for walks and pushing strollers”, he has said. “When I wrote my “A Millie” freestyle, that was me listening to 10 years of hip-hop and not relating to it at all,” he told Vibe magazine. “Like, damn I don’t sell coke. Damn, I don’t have cars or 25-inch rims. I don’t have guns … And it turns out a lot of people feel the same way I do.” In the words of one of the music’s bibles, XXL: “In Roth, hip-hop’s buying public finally has a voice: an upper-middle class suburban kid who is more frat boy than dope boy.”
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