Readings on the Railway

Perhaps the easiest road into this piece of my argument goes through Miami and draws on another
controversial rap act: 2 Live Crew. When their 1989 album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be first went gold (i.e., sold 500,000 copies), there was no public outcry, no lawsuits, no obscenity trials, no moralistic hand-wringing over what havoc this “dangerous” music was wreaking upon its audiences, because the bulk of those sales were in predominantly black and Latin “inner city” markets. Where 2 Live Crew ran into a buzzsaw of controversy was when they started to “cross over” to white audiences in significant ways. It’s no coincidence that their infamous obscenity trial took place not in Dade County (i.e., Miami, the urban market that the band called home and the site of their strongest fan base) but in Broward County (i.e., the much whiter, much richer, much more suburban county just north of Miami). As has long been the case, white America has only really cared about the allegedly dangerous effects of popular culture when its own children were the ones purportedly in harm’s way. “Hip hop,” as Eminem sagely reminds us, wasn’t a problem when it was found in black neighborhoods such as Harlem, but only after it crossed over to white America.

More important than sheer sales figures, however, is the perceived source of
Eminem’s threat. His music hasn’t “crossed over” from black to white: it’s come from within white
America, publicly giving the lie to the conceit that there’s a neat and immutable line that separates white from black—with all the dark, dirty, dangerous stuff allegedly living on the “other” side of that line. Put another way, the vision of itself that mainstream white America works overtime to perpetuate is a vision largely devoid of hate, violence, and prejudice.26 White America generally ignores or dismisses such attitudes, behaviors, and practices when they manifest themselves in its own ranks, while actively projecting them onto a broad range of marginalized Others: black bodies, brown bodies, lower class bodies, foreign bodies, and so on. At best (if you can call it that), when white America has to face its own warts and blemishes, it tries to find ways to explain them away as exceptions, as aberrations, as deviations … anything but as a common and pervasive aspect of white America’s normal condition. And Eminem clearly knows all this. For instance, he begins “The Real Slim Shady” with a sneering line that calls his race-baiting critics to task for their inability to understand that someone could walk and talk and rap and act the way that he does and still be white. Even more bluntly, on “The Way I Am,” he rails against white folks intent on trying to fix his racial identity in ways that allow them to maintain their illusions about the stability of race, rapping that he’s lost patience with cocky whites who would dismiss him as a “wigger.”

All I can think about, beyond the words I am reading, is how much I haven't written about Eminem and my story with his music. It is certainly a much much easier task than the Hirasawa or Uematsu quest.

Still, I wonder if I will ever get around exfoliating that account.