F E A R O F A W H I T E P L A N E T

anxiety about blackness�"particularly the perception that black

street culture is spreading into spheres of white domestic comfort,

privilege, and consumer culture. As songs like �śWhite America” and

�śSing for the Moment” attest, Eminem is well aware that his a‰nity

for hip hop likely expands an already substantial population of white

youths who find themselves, for a dizzying set of reasons, identifying

with black youth culture and style. The surging popularity of hip hop

among young whites explains why Eminem matters in hip hop. But it

also explains why he does not matter. Scholar and writer William Je-

lani Cobb maintains that �śin the race to imbue Eminem with some

enduring significance . . . the fact that he is not all that significant to hip hop has gone almost completely unnoticed.” In other words,

it does not matter if black kids�"long considered hip hop’s core�"

really like Eminem or not because their young white counterparts

clearly do. In their own way, white youth, largely as consumers, have

become just as important to hip hop as black or Latino youth.

Many hip-hop heads openly speculate about the growing in-

fluence of outside forces on the movement. Big media, with its con-

trol over corporate hip hop, shapes how most of the world views the

movement. White youth, with their deep pockets, shape how most of

the world consumes the movement. Take for example, the popular-

ization of hard core rap music. It was whites, consumers and radio

programmers, not black program directors who first embraced hard

core rap for radio. Doing so pushed a style of rap music that left some in the movement uneasy about the proliferation of gangstas, playas,

and pimps in hip-hop culture. In truth, white program directors are

not constrained by the responsibility or the burden carried by black

programmers. The latter have to contend with the legacy of racism

and concerns within the black community about the black image.

Eventually, the popularity of hard core rap on pop radio and

MTV forced black radio and even BET to adopt an aspect of hip hop

that, deep down, left them feeling uneasy and in some instances even

terrified. It is another example of how the struggle for hip hop is

driven, in part, by forces that the movement does not control. In his

109







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