Two upcoming hip-hop albums by white artists have left me with the realization that there's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things.
Let's start with the right way to do things and look at the first of these two albums, Cex's Being Ridden. Right off the bat, Cex's delivery inevitably invites comparisons to a younger, less angry version of Atmosphere's Slug. Although Cex's wordplay isn't as consistently brilliant as Slug's, his stream-of-conscious flow and penchant for spoken choruses is compelling nonetheless.
Where the album truly awes, however, is in the production category. Cex's beats rely heavily on unexpected, yet tasteful blasts of electronic noise, but it's the liberal incorporation of acoustic guitars that truly makes this a cut above the rest. Even though many of the songs on Being Ridden often seem content with mediocrity when they could be achieving greater things, the album still establishes Cex as a unique voice in hip-hop, one that is certainly worth following in the future.
On the other hand, we have the album Young Miss America by Gold Chains, a chubby, balding white man who could easily be mistaken for David Cross. Whereas Cex attempts to create his own brand of hip-hop, Gold Chains seems content just making fun of pre-existing hip-hop and reducing it to a simplified stereotype (and, judging by his emphasis on rap's materialistic \ice age"" from the late '90s, a rather dated one at that).
His music isn't very good, but more importantly, as a concept, Gold Chains is just plain offensive. In order to possibly find this sort of humor funny, one would have to subscribe to the notion that there are set roles for white people and black people, and that any deviance from these set racial roles is thus inherently funny.
Gold Chains tours primarily with indie-rock bands, and that worries me a lot, too, as this is the same scene that created the equally atrocious novelty act Har Mar Superstar. Both of these acts bastardize superior forms of music often associated with blacks, but because they do so with a straight-faced delivery, the naive indie-rock scene interprets it as irony. In my book, it's just plain offensive.
There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. Cex, with his serious commitment to hip-hop, seems to understand the right way. Gold Chains and his lack of talent in the fields of both music and humor, on the other hand, reminds me of just how right on Cex is when on Being Ridden he boldly proclaims ""Middle finger to the indie-rock scene.""
