Culture

Guys Who Hate Rap

Clayton Trutor

When I was growing up, there were two kinds of guys in my neighborhood. When I say guys, I mean men over the age of thirty. Anybody younger than that was a kid.

As I was saying, two kinds of guys in my neighborhood: guys who liked the country station and guys who liked the Classic Rock station. The country guys liked trucks a little bit too tall for their French Canadian blood. The classic rockers went for whatever the fastest red car that GMAC would finance for them. Country guys addressed you as “son.” Classic Rockers called you “brother,” Hulk Hogan style. Country guys got really into the goatee. Classic Rockers stuck with the mustache. Country guys wear their sunglasses over the visor of their duck-billed ball caps. Classic Rockers don’t need a hat. The chicks dig their locks.

In spite of all their differences, Country guys and Classic Rockers agreed on one thing. They agreed that Rap sucks and it’s not real music. It’s just a bunch of swearing and talk about selling drugs and being in a gang. Rap, they agreed, is bad for the kids, and not just because of the swearing and the gang-banging. The worst part of it was that the kids these days don’t know about any real bands.

At this point, country guy and classic rock guy diverged again. The country guy would say there’s no reason to listen to rap since there’s so much great stuff out there these days: Brooks-n-Dunn, Garth Brooks, George Strait, Alabama. The Classic Rock guy would say they don’t make good music anymore. You gotta hold on tight to the classics like ELO, BTO, and Boston.

It turns out that there were a lot of guys in a lot of neighborhoods who were thinking the same thing. And they still do. People who dislike hip-hop, or as they defiantly call it, “rap,” dislike it more vociferously than people have disliked any other genre of popular music. Hip-Hop has been in the mainstream of American pop music for close to a quarter century. Compare this to the track record of rock and roll. By the late 1970s, even people who didn’t like rock-n-roll generally tolerated the presence of the quarter-century old genre on the radio. This is not the case with Hip-Hop. People who dislike Hip-Hop don’t think it belongs on the radio period, even if the track in question is without vulgarity or reference to the thug life.

As kids my age approach the transition to guydom, I hear plenty of them taking up the battle cry of our forefathers that rap sucks. They have also appropriated the idea that real music is no longer being made. I hear them opining for the days of Soul Asylum, Ugly Kid Joe, and the Gin Blossoms. Even more disheartening, I hear kids younger than me talking like that too. They speak nostalgically on the train or the comments pages of YouTube videos about the halcyon days of Papa Roach and 3 Doors Down at the turn of the millennium.

What is the impetus for this multi-generational anti-rap consensus among flavorless white guys? Part of it is obviously racial. It demonstrates their continued discomfort with black males having a profound impact on what is deemed cool in their culture, which in turn reflects the continued anxiety among white males about interracial sexual relations between black males and white women. Being marginalized from a stake in contemporary cool robs white males of a great deal of their cultural and social power. This is a particularly pressing concern for working class white males, who by virtue of their economic status are already marginalized from the access to power typically associated with their race and gender. The white skinned, denim-clad rock and roller with his street-wise edge and slyness held a near monopoly on American cool for decades. The emergence of hip-hop as a popular art form in the 1980s offered an alternative form of youthful swagger which has challenged, if not dethroned, the rock and roller as the embodiment of adolescent male cool.

It’s not that simple though. Guys who hate rap can’t be explained away with a knee-jerk reference to race. The genre’s reputation figures into their thinking as well. While guys who hate rap have a tendency to conflate all the negative things they’ve ever heard about the genre into a thoughtless bundle, who doesn’t react this way to aspects of the culture to which you feel an aversion? I know for a fact that I react this way to horse people, jazz, stock car racing, National Public Radio, scrapbooking, psychological thrillers, Apple Computers, Peter Gabriel, abstract expressionism, TV on the Radio, and the films of Jean Luc Godard.

All the same, the reputation that hip-hop has among guys who hate rap is far from off-base. It reflects many realities of the genre. For starters, many of hip-hop’s most transcendent artists have exploited urban violence as a means of titillating their audience. Frequently, the artists’ themselves have experienced or witnessed such violence, but it would be naïve to suggest that their personal decisions to include these experiences in their rhymes have been merely to inform the public. While there are countless exceptions to this reputation, hip-hop artists, producers, and their record labels have transformed urban violence into a cash-cow of a cultural motif, shaping more than a generation’s worth of urban, suburban, and rural youths who’ve taken on thug posturing as their adolescent subculture of choice. Guys who don’t like rap know enough to pay lip service to the tradition of misogyny in hip-hop as well. It has long proven one of the most salient critiques of the genre and guys who don’t like rap never miss the opportunity to mention it.

Race and reputation figure prominently in the way guys who hate rap conceptualize hip-hop, but for many of them, they both remain abstractions which have little bearing on their actual lives. Guys who hate rap really get bent out by the way hip-hop culture manifests itself in their communities: when the kids in their neck of the woods start dressing and talking and acting like the guys they see on television. They hate the efforts of those taking on the hip-hop posture to “live the lifestyle,” which amounts to dressing conspicuously, emulating the language they hear in the music and now in a variety of media, and treating people with a form of disrespect which combines adolescent derision, non-acknowledgement, and opportunistic bravado. Guys who hate rap hate the phoniness of hip-hop posturing, particularly when they know the kid who’s taken it on and know that the thug life in no way reflects his life experience. Guys who hate rap had it tough, not like the kids of today with their Ipods and Facebook and not getting spanked.

More important than race, reputation, or posturing to the continued disdain for hip-hop among a large segment of the male population has to do with the actual music. Many guys hate rap simply find the music culturally inaccessible. They question whether or not it actually constitutes music. The fact that they insist on calling it “rap” demonstrates this. By referring to hip-hop as “rap,” they are emphasizing the vocals, which they see as just talking. Guys who hate rap, whether they are country guys, classic rock guys, or Gin Blossoms guys, all embrace music with a strong lead singer. Of course MCing doesn’t make sense to them.

“Hip-Hop” replaced “rap” as the popular nomenclature for the genre during the 1990s. It serves as a convenient, inclusive descriptor of contemporary urban music. The term “Hip-Hop” has been in use since the origins of the genre in the South Bronx in the 1970s. The use of “Hip-Hop” makes sense historically and it has been embraced by much of the listening public. This doesn’t suit the guys who hate rap. To them, MCing is the essential component of the hip-hop experience. They will keep calling it rap because that’s exactly what they hear.

Clayton Trutor is the editor-in-chief of American Polymath. For full disclosure’s sake, he is one of those square, arrhythmic white guys who loves hip-hop, but sucks all the fun out of it by trying to intellectualize it rather than just enjoying music, let alone getting out on the dance floor.