Over the years since hip hop broke through to a white audience, there has been a much feared moment of purists shaking in their sneakers that one day there will be an Elvis style revolution where the music’s core white audience will totally begin ignoring the black culture that spawned the music in the first place.
There was an initial scare in 1991 with Vanilla Ice, whose teeny bopper raps and MC Hammer-l(wh)ite stage show sold him many millions of his "To The Extreme" debut. But that was an isolated incident, as The Ice Man only lasted one album and was quickly wiped off of the face of the earth. Then 8 years later, Eminem came out and shocked the world by actually being a white guy with *gasp* non-embarrassing rapping talent. But he was a one-of-a-kind talent, since the music industry has tried several times to market another white guy as the heir to Eminem's honky MC throne and came up short with the likes of Bubba Sparxxx, Lil Wyte, and Paul Wall among others.
One of the things that saved hip hop from being over-run by white imitators was how ingrained having to have "street cred" is to the music. One of the things that killed off Vanilla Ice's career was that it was discovered he lied about being a hoodlum from the same streets of Miami where 2 Live Crew grew up, he was actually a nice suburban kid from outside of Dallas city limits. Eminem was smart enough not to even pretend he was street credible, he played up being a white trash punk from the trailer parks of Michigan, but he had enough people behind him who did like D12, Royce Da 5'9 and later Dr. Dre and 50 Cent to kill off any request for street credibility.
Eminem had so much cred that black people let him get away with using racial slurs, when his arch rival Ray Benzino, then co-owner of The Source magazine, leaked an early Eminem demo where the then teenager used racial slurs to insult a black woman he had broken up with. It turned out that the hip hop community actually turned on the black guy who leaked the song, as Benzino and his business partner Dave Mays were shunned by nearly the entire hip hop community until being fired from the magazine by their board of directors a few years later.
White people just can't even attempt to match street cred with black and hispanic people. Sure, there's tons of impoverished white folk in the world (like yours truly) but their version of poverty would be a dream come true to the realities of those who become rappers that rose up from big city slums.
Enter Kanye West. No, he isn't a white rapper, obviously. But he did totally change the game on what was acceptable to rap about. Kanye was a superstar producer who eventually followed Dr. Dre and Sean Combs into parlaying that production stardom into a very successful solo rapping career. Not only that, but he broke barriers inadvertently for white rappers. He made it okay to talk about being middle class and college educated in a world where most rappers brag about being broke and dropping out of high school. He made it okay to rap about those college years being the best years of many people's lives, whereas most rappers didn't seem to enjoy life at all until they made their first million rapping. He had a little bit of nerd in him in a genre where that was only okay if you were in N.E.R.D. In short he was a white emcee's savior without knowing it.
Enter Asher Roth. He has as much street cred as Bill Gates, and he's damn proud of it. He's a Jewish college graduate from suburban Pennsylvania. In interviews he has revealed he didn't even like hip hop until the age of 14 when he discovered Jay Z's "Hard Knock Life" on MTV, where he admits it was the Annie sample that drew him in. While attending West Chester University for an education degree, he started posting mp3s of himself rapping over instrumentals on his MySpace page and started Friend Requesting some people in the hip hop game hoping they'd be impressed. Eventually, Scooter Braun, who was the former Vice President of Jermaine Dupri's So So Def record label (who brought the world Kriss Kross and Lil Bow Wow) liked what he heard and started managing Roth. Despite being turned down for a spot at Roc-A-Fella after freestyling for his idol Jay Z, he had enough music industry buzz to eventually get signed by Universal’s off shoot SRC.
To put it bluntly, Asher Roth makes Vanilla Ice look like MC Ehit. The rapper doesn’t even attempt to try to be cool, he instead sets what sounds like a nostalgic LiveJournal entry of a college geek to a hip hop beat. While he does rap quite a bit about smoking pot, that’s the only thing you will find that is a mainstay of hip hop lyrics. Roth drops references to Saved By The Bell, Mario Kart, Full House actor Bob Saget, pro wrestlers Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, talking teddy bear Teddy Ruxpin, and LL Bean clothing among other things. And in between those dorky references, Roth replaces Cristal popping party tales for nights of downing Miller Lites and going out for cheap pizza after getting the munchies from smoking pot all night in your dorm room. Which gets as monotonous and unimaginative as the mindless party anthems we all bitch about hip hop overdoing. It just feels like one long novelty record. The one joke being “Ha ha, this white guy is taking emo rock lyrics and rapping them, I get it.” While most rappers rap about their poverty and/or criminal lifestyles causing their bad days, on the song “Bad Day” Roth’s personal hell is not being able to poop during a flight and his hotel room not having HBO.
After listening to this album, I‘m pretty sure you‘d find Asher Roth‘s picture in the dictionary under “smarmy.” Sorry, but there is absolutely nothing interesting about being upper middle class that ever needs to be documented in song lyrics. I don’t care who you are. There is a reason the vast majority of noted lyricists came from humble beginnings. Or at the very least find other topics to discuss than what it’s like being from a well-to-do family.
Asher even launches a pre-emptive strike on haters in the song called “As I Em”. Written before anybody even knew who the hell he was, he takes on critics who would eventually compare him to Eminem. Well, this critic thinks that’s being far too kind to Mr. Roth, but I digress. On the song he admits he had his mother purchase “The Slim Shady LP” for him as a teen and it influenced his career choice, but that he can’t handle it when critics say “Asher wants to be Marshall Mathers.” Of course this was written before Roth ever got his first professional review, so most critics believe like I do that he’s giving himself way too much credit. There are a litany of rappers who have copied the style of Eminem since 1999, Roth is just the only one who got mainstream success from it.
After a concert in England last month, one British reviewer wrote “What [boy band] Busted is to punk rock, Asher Roth is to Eminem”. Meaning he’s just taking Eminem’s window dressing and repackaging it into something much more consumer friendly. And bland. And smarmy. He is to Eminem what Pat Boone was to Elvis.
This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for (either in hope or anxiety depending on your viewpoint) a white rapper has erased nearly every characteristic its black creators put into it. Some feel it’s only right that the white fan base get a rapper who reflects their reality instead of vicariously living through urban poverty in rap lyrics. Others fear this is a sign that Nas’s warning of hip hop being dead due to over commercialism is sadly true.
But so far it’s selling fairly well, with the album debuting at #5 on the Billboard chart. Now it remains to be seen if his hit “I Love College” was just a novelty song fluke, or if he has broken down doors for affluent white rappers to make music for the affluent white fanbase that has supported the music for years. Hey, say what you want, but at least the guy “keeps it real” as he knows it.
RATING: 1/5
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