When you hear the term white rappers, do you first think of white wrapping paper, tied up with a colored bow and handed to a person at a birthday party? If so, then you are way off base and probably not in touch with a certain genre of music. White rappers is the term used for people who perform rap music, but belong to the Caucasian race. The distinction is made between white rappers from other rappers simply because the traditional performer of rap music used to be African American.
The White Rappers
When you listen to music, probably one of the last things you are doing is trying to determine what the race is of the performer. Do you care if they have brown skin, white skin, yellow skin or pink skin? Nope. What you care most about is what the song sounds like and how well you enjoy the music. Rap has a particular beat to it and if you are concentrating on the music, nothing else matters.
Rap music started becoming more mainstream in the 1980s. Prior to that, it was performed in the streets by young black men. It wasn’t an official music genre, because there weren’t any big name acts that performed in concerts and there certainly weren’t many radio stations that played rap music. That changed in the mid 1980s and 1990s when rap music became a recognized music genre.
Rap music now has its own category at various music awards, like the Grammy, but it didn’t until sometime during the 1990s. If there happened to be a rap song that was popular, it had to compete in the pop or rock category. Once it got its own category, the industry exploded with a lot of musicians who recorded music and became very popular. Some of those artists include Dr. Dre, Eminem, The Beastie Boys, Tupac Shakur, Coolio, Snoop Dogg and many more.
Even though the artists all sing or perform under a genre name, there was some disparity among them. Black rappers thought they had a right to the genre because they felt like they created it. They did not think that white rappers had as much talent or ability as they did when performing the songs or writing the music. This notion, even though not everyone believed it, led to arguments and disagreements between the groups. This argument then led to more arguments which resulted in the distinction between East coast and West coast rappers.
Violence often ensued whenever there were many rappers together because they would argue over who was better. A shooting resulted in the death of Tupac Shakur, and since then, a semi truce has been called between all of the performers under the rap genre. There are still disagreements and occasional violence, but not like there used to be a decade or two ago between them. White rappers can all enjoy in each other’s success in getting the genre noticed.