A Stark Contrast

CLARISSA PABI GIVES HER VIEW ON DAVID STARKEY'S CONTROVERSIAL NEWSNIGHT COMMENTS AND SPEAKS OUT ABOUT DIVERSITY IN THE WORLD OF HIP-HOP

‘The whites have become black…you glorify rap!’ squalled David Starkey on BBC Newsnight days after the London riots -  for Starkey the young ‘whites’ who glorify rap are minstrels.  But they are not minstrels ‘blacking up’ in order to ‘take the mick’ out of ‘black[s]’, for Starkey it is much darker than that.  Are you ready for it? The ‘whites’ have literally become black and they are not ‘taking the mick’!

As asinine as this may sound it seems to be a commonly belief held by an old white middle class, who being from the class of 1899 are entirely out of touch with the youth and the rap culture that they seem to hate so much. So whilst listening to Starkey’s Newsnight interview, his talk on rap and ‘whites’ becoming black, I wonder what would Starkey think about white rappers?

Starkey’s comments about rap’s influence on white people and the way in which they supposedly speak were clearly informed (if informed at all) from an idea he has about American rap or ‘Ali G in da House’. And yet the way in which American rap has influenced people's speech all over the world is wholly different from the way in which UK rap has influenced the way in which young people use language. The globalization of rap and the ways in which black rappers speak has lead to the glocalisation of an identity that local young people (be they black, white, Asian or Arabic) have created in their own areas. Thus the issue is not as black and white as people like Starkey would have you believe. And as Nicki Minaj would say ‘Be lee dat woah!’ (believe that woah).

‘What is the relationship between rap, black culture, and the way young people speak?’

Yelawolf recently signed to Eminem's
Shady Records

'Ebonics', 'Black British English' and 'Multicultural London English' are different ways that people use English and many rappers have grown up speaking these Englishes. But Ebonics, often called Black American English, differs from MLE (what Starkey sees as ‘Jamaican patois’) as MLE also has influence from a few other cultures. As both these ways of using English emerge out of different contexts and how they relate to rap in America, the UK and the rest of the world is wholly different. It makes no sense to say 'UK whites have become black’ because of rap. Rap has not made young white people black - if anything, it has made young people value black culture and their own youth culture more than people like Starkey ever could.

Yet rap as it stands today is not as heavily reliant on Ebonics or the Black English as it once was. So in order to really interrogate and then merk David Starkey’s ideas about rap and young people, we must ask the question: ‘What is the relationship between rap, black culture, and the way young people speak?’

An interesting place to start looking is with white rappers in Americas. A new generation of white rappers is emerging in America, Columbia’s newly signed Kreayshawn and Eminem’s protege Yelawolf are just a few to name. But rappers of different ethnic backgrounds are nothing new. Matisyahau, a renowned American Hasidic Jewish rapper, has long been relating the Jewish experience to the black and Rastafarian experience. This is what rap is able to do at its best: make experiences and identities interchangeable. It is able to make people who maynot be from the same background understand some common ground.

To say the whites have become black makes no sense. The success of rap is partly due to the fact that certain parts of rap culture embrace different racial identity and (most importantly) youth identity. So if it is possible that there are white rappers, Jewish rappers, female rappers and even deaf rappers, who all relate the double-barrel part of their name to rap culture, what other genre of music can be named that does this so fluidly? I can't think of one that is so inclusive.

Indeed, rap culture is, at its best, so inclusive that it can even allow someone like David Starkey to become a rapper. Just check out ‘Starkey Rap 2: Even Starker’ below - in which the rapper GangStar-Key formally known as David Starkey recites some mad lyrics like ‘For me the key was listening to Jeremy Paxman/Turn the screen off you’d think I was black man’.

By Clarissa Pabi