White Critics and Violent (Black) Rap

I've never really stopped to think about or listen to the racial / political debate that is centered around music, even though it's pretty clearly there. The following article clip by Dave Bry discusses Chief Keef's album "Finally Rich" and the criticism orbiting around it. I don't think much about race when it comes to critical listeners, since it is their job to listen to the good aspects of a song, rather than worry about who performs it. But that's maybe not so true.

Read on to learn about the discussion...

If you’ve heard of Chief Keef, a 17-year-old rapper from Chicago, it may be because he signed a $3 million dollar recording contract with Interscope Records last year, soon after spending two months under house arrest at his grandmother’s for pointing a gun at a police officer. Or you may have heard his biggest hit, “I Don’t Like,” a list of things he finds disagreeable punctuated with boasts of his virility, copious drug references,and murderous threats. “We ain’t gon’ fight,” he raps. “Our guns gon’ fight…” It’s a great song, mostly due to the powerful beat constructed by producer Young Chop, but one of the catchiest parts is Keef chanting “bang bang” in the background—a sound that has become all too common in Chicago, which had more than 500 murders last year.


Chief Keef is black, as are a disproportionate number of gun-violence victims in this country, and his music has been criticized for glorifying guns, which it does. He has also been criticized for being a poor rapper. His lyrics are terse and simple and delivered in a blunt, heavily slurred monotone. The Associated Press’ Jonathan Landrum called Keef’s major-label debut “woeful” and “borderline unbearable.” Nevertheless, when that album, Finally Rich (a sublimely ridiculous title, considering Keef’s age), came out in December, it had its supporters, too. Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene awarded it a 7.5 rating, calling it “ruthlessly effective.” Spin’s Jordan Sargent gave it an 8, praising Keef’s “unalienable artistic skill that so many people are invested in making you believe he doesn’t possess.” Cocaine Blunts blogger Andrew “Noz” Nosnitsky chose “Don’t Like” as his third favorite rap single of the year and tweeted, “chief keef made a fun album. i don’t know what the rest of you critics are listening to.” 

Greene, Sargent, and Noz are white, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Keef’s detractors. Ted Bawno, who's either a wealthy older white media mogul who founded ego trip magazine in the early ’90s or a fictional construction of ego trip’s non-white staff members, took to Twitter to say, “white people love chief keef because he is the Chief of Nothing and only poses a threat to other blacks in down-trodden neighborhoods.” Brian “B.Dot” Miller, who is black, and an editor at Rap Radar, took Sargent to task directly, tweeting at him to “please stop writing about MY culture,” bemoaning “cultural tourists writing about the music of MY culture” and “outsiders like yourself in hipster media that get a hard-on by overanalyzing black music.” An anonymous reader of Noz’s blog, meanwhile, wrote him to ask: “Has anyone ever told you that because you are a white supremacist you’re promoting minstrel show music like Chief Keef, Wacka Flocka and whatnot on your blog, because you want to make sure your white race stays ahead … ?”

Damn. Read the rest here.