Hip-hop music

One of the few places that many blacks have continually been able to have success has been in music (rather than seeming one-offs like Obama, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Oprah). And hip-hop is very strongly associated with Black and Latino culture (Hell, the association is even made in the first sentence on Wikipedia).

Even there though, they haven’t been fully accepted. I’ll point to the Grammys as my example. From the first time hip-hop was acknowledged as a genre in 1989, there was a boycott because they didn’t televise the Hip-hop awards and didn’t acknowledge some key artists of the genre. And this year yet again, still none of the rap awards were televised. And I’ll have you know, it isn’t because rap’s not mainstream, rap was the only genre category where every nominated album went platinum.

Even if the presentation around the Rap awards went well though, the actual awards would not have. Although I disagree with this author’s intense dislike for Macklemore, this article explains best why Macklemore’s victory could be seen as race issue. Here’s an excerpt:

The industry’s long been looking to find the white rapper they can hold near and dear to their hearts, ostensibly in an effort to extricate blackness from hip-hop, just as they did with rock music decades earlier. There have been pockets of white novelty rap — as “old school” as Vanilla Ice and as recent as Kreayshawn — and the rub with Eminem was that he never really played the game and always used his whiteness for transgression and subversion and rebellion, rather than selling a culture out. But they’ve finally cracked the white rapper code with Macklemore…

And Macklemore’s actually in agreement with many of the points of the article. He, too, knew Kendrick should have won. And if you look at the second verse of his song “A Wake”, it’s him telling the media and his fans that they are wrong for praising him as the first one to raise these “novel” points in rap.

In the end though, as far as race goes, winning those awards and gaining success hasn’t stopped black musicians from being racially profiled off-stage, just look at the cases of John Legend(9 wins and 22 nominations) or Wiz Khalifa(5 nominations, and another Barney’s incident).