So he’s back. Presumably with another multiplatinum, bitch. You know who I’m talking about. The kracka you love to hate. Only don’t hate Eminem because he’s white. Hate him because he’s the only the free man in commercial hiphop. Hate him because he’s the only man in hiphop not burdened with representing the ‘hood and black sex to hiphop’s prime real estate, the vanilla suburbs. Hate him because he gets paid by the industry to be whimsical and personal. Free to be Em when such whimsical and personal negro geniuses as Beans, Vast Aire, Jean Grey and Prince Po’ got to mine the more-freelance-than-free-hiphop underground. Of course they’re free too—free to mine the underground, free never to be seen on a Viacom-owned negro entertainment station, free to never get played on hiphop radio, but this is a price negroes must pay when their music can’t be used to score Girls Gone Wild.

Of course Mr. Em has his own cross to bear since, just like the DC hardcore band Minor Threat, he knows better than most how he’s ‘guilty of being white’. So guilty that on Encore Mr. Em allots a fair amount of his time as a free man coming on a humble, begging forgiveness, tripping over lines to explain himself to the negro community about getting involved in ‘coon bidness such as 50 Cents’ beef with Ja Rule and Murder, Inc., and those rediscovered ancient rhymes riddling black girls with Mick Jagger-worthy abuse, and asking us to feel for the hateration he’s getting from the magazine of hiphop culture and politics.

His exercise of white freedom has also found him banned from Viacom owned BET, presumably on the sensitive negro community’s behalf, for his Michael Jackson-mocking video. It has also found him scribed on the covers of other hiphop magazines as ‘the greatest living rapper, ‘ which always makes me laugh and think of how predisposed white supremacy has made even colored journalists to crown any white man who takes a Black artform to the bank as the greatest who ever lived. Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman, Elvis, Eric Clapton, Larry Bird; take your pick. Forgetting that one hugged up BB King lick contains more blues content than Clapton’s entire life, and that one second of Air Jordan shot is more enviable to most ball lovers than Bird’s entire career, and that it is still Black Culture we’re talking about here, hello, where substance is measured in grams of style. On this scale, bound up as it is with the weight of pleasant race memories, Slick Rick’s ever so fey utterance of ‘Six minutes, six minutes, six minutes Dougie Fresh you’re on, fresh fresh on’ is what comes out weighing a ton, not the other man’s faux-platinum platters.

So let’s take a break, be real here and say I see Eminem’s utter existence as one more test of the eternal American battleground of racial esthetics, racial limits and racial license. Presuming, just for arguments sake, that the negro community has ever had the power to decide how much gentrification and cultural invasion it’s comfortable with. Or that there’s somewhere on the face of this green earth where the will of white men can be thwarted whenever they want to break into the act. Now I know negroes who otherwise avoid white people like the plague who love Mr. Em, and other negroes who work with Caucasians - and that love them - who think Dr. Dre needs to be strung from a tree for consorting with the enemy and bringing Mr. Em into the mix. Then there is She who sees not a man but a Corny Culture Vulture anytime Mr. Em appears in the atmosphere, and who will brook no equivocation from anyone about his skillz, wit, lyrics, hooks, attitude etc., etc., etc, not even from her celebrity MC friends whom She won’t hesitate to then deride as an equally corny bunch of sell-out motherfuckers. Reminding me of the avant-garde jazz cat I overheard in the 70s tell a confrere, ‘The white boy already got everything else, do we have to give him the music too?’’ Reminding me of that moment nearly a decade ago long before the advent of Mr. Em when I heard the MC Sha-Key lament, ‘I thought hiphop was a Black Thing.’

See the problem is that for the most of the world being Black is about some kind of performance—some sheet you say or you do or you jigaboo. But for Black people being Black is about family. About who your people are and the condition their Black condition is in. It is about births and deaths, marriages and divorces, in sickness and in health. So all that singing and dancing and clapping and styling and rhyming and wilding the whole world apparently loves to see and tries to be to the degree they’ll pay for the privilege—that stuff which organically occurs in that family context first before the voyeurs, carpet baggers and the vultures arrive. All the sorrow, angst, love, rage, and the casual fatalism. The kind of casual fatalism that breeds conversations like I overheard on 116th and Adam Clayton Powell the other day, right in front of Graham Court, where one brother said to another, straight-faced and not a hint of irony, ‘He’ll be out soon, he didn’t get much time, he only got ten more years.’ That real Black Angst. The kind of angst that only the burdensome, belaboring crucible of white supremacy could twist into those bizarre, contorted and comforting expressions of Black Pleasure and Irony known as bebop and hiphop and the blues.