Is Nerdcore Hip Hop Racist?

Rap and hip-hop were almost always part of my personal soundtrack growing up. I have listened to rap since the age of 8, taping what I could off the radio, or sharing a pair of headphones with my best friend and his Walkman personal cassette player. I have always enjoyed wordplay. My toying with lyrics and language started with in the first grade; I would spend hours idly mixing up words and phrases and syllables and putting them back together again just to see how they'd roll off the tongue.

Growing up, I eagerly sought out music from all sorts of diverse genres: blues, American folk, Nintendo chiptunes, classical, jazz, 60s rock, techno, hip-hop and rap. I started listening to Ice-T, and moved to S House of Pain, De La Soul, and the Wu-Tang Clan. I listened to experi-mental and underground rappers like Deltron 3030 and Talib Kweli and more mainstream artists like Eminem and Method Man.

I progressed from being a fan of nerdcore rappers like MC Frontalot and ytcracker and MegaRan, to being encouraged to try my hand at nerdcore rap. I was attracted to the do-it-yourself aesthetic, and the raucous but supportive community. However, my participation in a genre of hip-hop culture does not happen in a vacuum. As Rodriguez says in an interview in Reason Magazine's September 1994 issue, "How do I account for the fact that, at a time when black and white relationships are so difficult in America, blond kids are listening to rap? Within what is desired is also what is feared... We bring part of ourselves to culture at large, as the culture around us presses on us."

In terms of its cultural heritage, hip-hop has historically been about much more than reciting poetry over a beat, just as haiku has been about more than trying to fit a three-five-three rhyme scheme. To a lot of old-school rap and hip-hop fans I've talked to, the themes of overcoming suffering and adversity in a poor urban environment define rap just as much as the tight beats and the non-melodic delivery. Even in some of the old, silly rap like the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," one gets a sense of rap as a cultural language that allows an otherwise powerless people to assert themselves; rappers tell stories about their culture and lifestyle, and comfort, encourage, and empower each other through their common suffering (By this definition, to be fair, a lot of contemporary rap--even gangsta rap, and all of crunk--is not rap). Rap then becomes a sort of contemporary oral history, and making music in the same style that isn't part of that history is akin to writing something in the style of African-American spirituals that doesn't have anything to do with slavery.

"Nerdcore [is] an anthropological extension of how hip-hop has evolved. The whole political component of the African American experience in the Bronx in the '70s, and the financial disparity under Reagan in the '80s, is kind of what hip-hop trades on as its old-school genesis. Nerdcore has the potential to... turn hip-hop into this weird minstrel show..."

--MC Lars, nerdcore rapper

Nerdcore rap's traditional content has an inherent frivolity. Instead of drugs, poverty, or living with violence, much of nerdcore deals with video games, computers, math, or niche interests. MC Frontalot, the artist who coined the word "nerdcore", even takes a swipe at this privilege with a track titled "First World Problem". Nerdcore as a genre has an inescapable status as a product of privilege, with education and access to bought things being a prerequisite to understand it.

The nerdcore genre is so alien to the traditional theme of overcoming adversity that I can see why people would interpret it as a trivializing, insulting misinterpretation of the genre, like some sort of Internet-based minstrel show. The history behind rap, and its power to move people, has compelled people to draw strict limits on the eligible subject matter, lest rap and hip-hop be profaned into something trivial.

I don't do black music
I don't do white music
I make fight music for high school kids
--Eminem, "Who Knew"

Eminem managed to break into the industry despite his whiteness partly because he understood and identified with the core elements of rap. Most of his early work is about growing up poor in Detroit, the same part of Detroit where a lot of famous black rappers come from. Eminem emphasizes that the experience of poverty so central to rap is not one that observes racial boundaries. According to him, the trailer-trash white guy knows just as much about adversity as the ghetto gang-bangers across the street.

The point of rap, according to this school of thought, is to provide catharsis to people who can relate to that experience of adversity, and inspire them to overcome it. That is why Eminem has credibility among black rappers, while Vanilla Ice never did.

Many critics make a big deal about the making of music for the sake of music, and genres not being ideologies...but there are also a fair number of people who disagree. For example, the Austin Chronicle's Raul Rodriguez blamed Britney Spears for "killing rock 'n' roll..." in his article "The Death of Rock and Roll".

"Don't you hear it? Listen! The music of our words. 'Sumer is icumen in. . . ' And songs on the car radio. We need Aretha Franklin's voice to fill plain words with music-her life."

--Richard Rodriguez, "The Achievement of Desire"

The irony is that of the many nerdcore rappers out there, I am probably one who is most eligible for credibility in my approach to rap. I have been through the school of hard knocks. I have known poverty and suffering, and lived in poor neighborhoods, and had great difficulty raising my station in life due to my socioeconomic status. I'm not someone who sees rap as something to make fun of .

I have not only been able to celebrate video games, Internet culture, and Dungeons & Dragons long before they were accessible to most people living below the upper-middle class, but can genuinely speak for how these things have helped me make my way through a difficult life.

Do I feel that my work in nerdcore is racist? Is racism something inherent to the nerdcore genre itself? I can only speak for my own intentions, but I have yet encounter anyone that I thought was trying to insult or disparage people of another race.

There are some people that maintain nerdcore is nothing but a parody genre. I don't buy that. Yes, there are many nerdcore lyricists that pride themselves on being witty, but among the nerdcore artists I've seen and listened to the primary goal isn't to make people laugh, it's for the artists to tell a story.

Some of the confusion comes from an antiquated assumption that hip-hop is only 'black' music and shouldn't be attempted by people of other races. The whole point of hip-hop is that it's supposed to be the voice of the people. Today, hip-hop has evolved into an art or form of expression that has gone global, and is so ubiquitous that it's even become part of geek culture, too.

So, this should be an open and shut case, right? After all, I don't mean to co-opt anything; I'm just trying to express myself in a way that's creative and real to me. I also haven't encountered any deliberate racism in the genre either. Ergo, there are no problems. QED.

Right?

No, wrong. Just because I see no problems, does not mean that problems do not exist. I am privileged enough to be able to ignore racism in society, and racism in myself if I so choose.

As a white male who can pass for straight, I am someone who has many advantages in society and culture just by the fact that society skews in my favor. This means that when it comes to matters of racism, it's not for me to ultimately decide whether my actions are racist. Just because I think I'm a nice guy, and just because I do my best to examine anti-racism and work to become an effective "ally" doesn't mean that I can't unknowingly do or say something racist or exclusionary. In my everyday life, I also never intend to come off like a jerk or be misunderstood-- that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen! Being defensive does nobody any favors.

Intent doesn't mitigate impact.

So what does this mean for my own participation in nerdcore? Honestly, I'm still working on that. I wish I could end this entry with a pat answer or neat conclusion, but the truth is, I don't know. I'm going to have to think a bit on my place in things and the unconscious attitudes I bring with me.

It's not easy, and it's not fun, but it needs to be done if I want to continue to be a better person, instead of digging in my heels and insisting that it's someone else's problem, that my motives are good so I am beyond reproach. I owe it to not only myself, but to every rap and hip-hop artist that came before me. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, I can stand tall as a rapper because I stand on the shoulders of artistic giants that came before me. It is incumbent upon myself to make sure that I build a solid, respectful foundation, instead of just stepping on everyone that happened to get there before me.