I like winding up my mates, a lot and I especially like winding up a very good friend of mine who despite being a hiphop obsessive won't engage with anything contemporary besides homeboy sandman and action bronson. So for fun I said white people should never rap, can't rap, by definition which made him really mad, which was obviously my.intention and when he demanded I justify it I sent him this which is deliberately a bit basic and tendentious but also contains a lot of what I believe for better or worse
any given musical form,whether it is rap, reggae,rock or jungle, is an expression, an outgrowth, of culture, of a way of being, a mode of existence, an historical inheritance,a place in society. I think music is like the rhythm of your words, or the rhythm of your walk. i think it is fundamental to your being. it is your breath made audible. the very essence of who you are,and a reflection of those things which made you.
when the blues was taken from the country (delta blues) to the industrial north, it became something completly new. (chicago blues) why? becasue it came from altered cultural and social circumstances. you cannot make delta blues in chicago. the input determines the output if the art is genuine. anything else is mere mimicry.
when hip-hop first arrived in the UK it inspired mimicry. over time it interbred with dance music and reggae and gave birth to a genuine natural art form. jungle. jungle is not mimicry. it is art. it is living culture.
it is my contention that hip-hop is so bound up with the actual fact of being african-american, that no one but african-americans can make it. or, to put it in less inflammatory language, when other people make it,it becomes something different. white-rap,for example.
why does rap from memphis sound so utterly different from rap from new york? the rhythm of life is different. people speak at a different pace, and with different cadence. people walk at a different pace, and with a different rhythm, body language is different,social relations are different, the built and the natural enviroment is different, the weather is different.
if the culture is differernt then necessarily the music will be different as well. the two things are INSEPERABLE.
therefore,a white american, who again, necessrily, inhabits a completely different world to an african-american, rhyming over a beat, will not be making hip-hop,or will at best, be making 'white-rap' or, even worse (becasue of the dishonesty and fraudulence involved) will be making a mimicry, or a forgery.
a white man cannot play the blues. they can play the chords, but they cannot play the blues, becuase they cannot inhabit the experience that informs the blues,that is to say,the experience of being black in america at a time when slavery was in the recent past. I