With Lollapalooza upon us, this marks the start of an awkward yet delicate dance familiar to white rap music fans.
At those pivotal festival moments when the cool, swaggering young rapper dips his mic toward audience members in a gesture for them to finish the verse, white patrons have an important decision to make:
Do they repeat the verse that contains the most vilified word of our time, or quickly mumble it and avoid an awkward moment with any black fans? By “it,” of course, I’m talking about the conversation-killing N-word.
Lately, the topic has gotten a lot of attention as hip-hop acts continue to diversify the largely white music festival circuit at events like Coachella, South by Southwest, Union Park’s recent Pitchfork festival and this week’s Lollapalooza.
Bronzeville rapper Noname addressed the issue at Pitchfork when she presented a new song that included the N-word as part of the chorus, but she included an alternative for white fans.
“I wrote this part so that you white people would have something to do, since y’all can’t ever say that word,” she told the crowd.
But they do say it.
That magic word brought May’s Hangout Festival in Alabama to a screeching halt when a young white fan dropped the N-bomb while rapping onstage with Kendrick Lamar during a set of his hit “m.A.A.d city.”
“You gotta bleep one single word,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lamar told the fan, according to published reports. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I do it?” she was quoted as asking, surrounded by an angry, booing crowd.
After a lifetime of being spoon-fed negative black images, the “To Pimp a Butterfly” star would like white America to let black people exclusively have the word, he recently told Vanity Fair magazine.
But the word is enjoying something of a pop culture renaissance in these early years of the 21st century, well beyond its origin as the soul-crushing racial invective. In the last five decades the word has become a piece of performance art by black icons from Richard Pryor and Dave Chapelle to Drake and Childish Gambino, morphing it into cool slang for some young white rap-loving hipsters and others.
You too may have heard two white teenagers using the word when speaking to one another. I was certainly reminded of this when I fell in with a diverse group of 20-somethings at the recent Wicker Park Fest. There, I met a group of friends whose ethnic backgrounds included white, African-American, Latino and Middle Eastern.
With music from a car radio droning in the background, I listened to the friends pepper their sentences with the N-word when referring to ex-boyfriends, bosses, authority figures or any troublesome presence. It wasn’t, however, used in any racial sense. One of the friends, a young woman whose family came from Palestine, told me she wasn’t trying to be offensive but expressed herself that way, she said with Cardi B’s confidence.
But using that word has real world consequences, especially from older African-Americans who still bristle at its casual use and support its retirement. Social media are awash in videos of whites and non-African-Americans saying the word, then follow-up videos of them losing their careers or being otherwise publicly scorned.
Last year, a friend who is also African-American told me of how a young white co-worker tried used the N-word with him, not as a slur, but as two black friends would. He did not feel that love and complained to supervisors. Her attempts to connect with him were a failure and she was quickly fired.
Last year writer Brian Joseph wrote for Spin magazine about how some rappers had begun scaling back use of the N-word as more hip-hop acts joined the white festival circuit.
While stars like Lamar and Chance the Rapper are in the “It’s our word” camp, the same article also interviewed younger rappers, including Chicago star G Herbo, who suggest that younger stars aren’t taking the same stance.
“If a white person says (it) and he’s saying my lyrics, I don’t take it for nothing but that,” he told the magazine.
Further complicating matters is how the word’s original racial use (ending in “er”) has been usurped to become a friendly term, expressing shared struggle, or just a general one (ending in “a”). “Sometimes there may be a situation where I call a white person (that),” G Herbo told Spin.
A.D. Carson, an assistant professor of hip-hop for the University of Virginia’s music department, knows this tightrope. A native of downstate Decatur who performs under the name AyDee The Great, Carson rejects the notion of the N-word as cool slang, though he has used it and doesn’t dissuade his own students from using it in his rap songwriting course.
“I don’t know if the word is losing its negative connotation. My instinct says no, but I know there are all kinds of layers being continually added, peeled back, folded into others, and hopefully forcing us to think critically,” Carson said.
“Context is, and always will be, important. The further we get from that, I think, the more reckless we get with our understanding of word work.”
So should we kill the word and bury it once and for all, or keep it around for scientific and artistic purposes? Whatever decision we make, those kids rapping along this weekend should remember that word, whether sung, rapped or yelled, still has power.
Twitter @MidNoirCowboy
