Nicky Cheese

Hipster rap. Not segregationist, not white-washing. It’s just fun.

From this week’s Reader, an argument that ought to be thoughtfully considered within the entire race debate:

Oh Word blogger Sach O claims hipster rap is “intended for an affluent, generally educated white audience wanting to dabble in the excesses of black music absent from more restrained contemporary rock without really investing themselves in the less comfortable aspects of black culture.” White kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop, in other words, without all the scary black people. But in Chicago t least, the hipster-rap scene has always drawn mixed crowds. It’s not the less comfortable aspects of black culture it avoids but the less comfortable aspects of hip-hop culture—the thuggishness and ignorance, hardly confined to black artists and fans, that high-minded blogs like Oh Word and Unkut.com go out of their way to criticize in mainstream rappers. [emphasis mine]