Do you judge the music you enjoy by the color of the skin of the person making it? If you don’t, you’re a normal person. If you do, you’re qualified to be a music critic at The Washington Post.
Chris Richards, a man so white he’s nearly clear, is not happy with Iggy Azalea. Not so much with her music (which he rightly slams), but with her success. While I share his concern that her music is awful and the fact that anyone outside of her immediate family bought it is an indicator of the end of western civilization, Richards’ biggest problem appears to be that she’s “a white, 24-year-old Barbarella from Australia who raps with the inflection of a black girl from Atlanta.”
To Richards and his ilk, rap is the dominion of “an exclusive expression of black urbanity.” Oh, he’s fine with white people rapping, but succeeding is something else.
“And as rap’s borders continue to evaporate, the music’s future is riddled with uncertainties about race. Will tomorrow’s white rappers — and they will be legion — step into the spotlight as virtuous contributors or thoughtless colonizers?” he wonders.
There’s a simple way to handle this – make better music than anyone else. Or, more to the point, make the kind of crap music people like better than other offerings.
Look, I’m no fan of rap in general. When it comes to my taste in rap it’s more Eminem, Eazy-E, Public Enemy, Kid Rock, Dana Dane, Kool Moe Dee, etc., but in general I prefer treble, a good guitar lick. I’ll take any song by The Replacements over any rap song ever recorded, but that’s just me. And that’s the point.
Music, as has always been the case, is in the ear of the beholder.
When you hear a song for the first time it either hits you or it doesn’t. Some songs can grow on you over time, but that first wave of sound usually hits you on some level or it doesn’t. If your mind goes to “What race is this person?” when you first hear a song, the problem isn’t with the music or the artist, it’s with you.
Richards lists black rappers who have a problem with Azalea’s success. But again, their objections are with her skin, not her (lack of) ability. Therefore, the problem, in as much as there is one, is in their heads, in their character. It’s racist.
Music has no race, it has no skin, and it has no limitations artificially imposed on it by society because of those bogus constructs. If it did the world would have been denied the greatness of Charlie Pride, Jimi Hendrix, Thin Lizzy and countless other artists who, long before today, made the music they loved without thinking they don’t look like the majority of their peers.
Yet Richards puts the music, which I can’t emphasize enough is awful, dead last. “But after parsing Azalea’s rivalries, her alliances, her gender, her race, her blondness, her birthplace and her background,” he writes, “we finally arrive at the fundamental ickiness of her fame: the music.”
Of her delivery, he writes, “it’s a needling imitation of a black Southern voice, with syllables that twang in the wrong direction and vowels that curve into sour shapes. It’s pantomime devoid of personality. An empty white echo.” I don’t know where Richards is from, but there’s ignorance, and maybe some racism, in thinking that sort of speaking is unique to a race rather than a region.
After pointing it out, Richards quickly attempts to manufacture cover for himself. “As hollow as it feels, it’s important to remember that Azalea has every right to strike this pose,” he says. Magnanimous.
Richards’ biggest gripe, the event that seemed to inspire his column, is Iggy has been nominated for a “Best Rap Album” Grammy. “Regardless of how it all shakes out, the nominations alone should remind us that the American record biz is still chillingly adept at using whiteness to sell blackness.”
In the grand scheme of things, who gives a damn? If you don’t like someone’s music don’t buy it. Look, I just didn’t buy Iggy Azalea’s music, right now. Easy. But to whine about race in music, to claim anyone shouldn’t be making or finding success in any genre of music because of how much melanin their skin has, in 2015, is the real problem, and it lives in the media. Society, thankfully, is better than that, and getting better all the time.