Eminem is just a amazing artist. I really hate rap but I love a lot of Eminem songs.
lmaoooo
anyway I watched it and I had the exact disconnect with several pillars of his argument that I figured I would. Having vanilla ice and Mac Miller be the before and after comparables for Eminem is tenuous at best, especially since neither ever came anywhere close to his visibility or popularity, and in Miller's case was certainly not influenced by Eminem's style of rap (his lineage is much more in a Kanye West > Kid Cudi emotional/melancholy tree).
the battle rap segment at the end to highlight the punchline that no one would be talking about Mac Miller if he wasn't white is disrespectful as hell, even for some clunky black essentialist comparison to basketball where the current best player in the NBA is a white European. It's fine to have personal opinions, and FD admits Mac Miller's music isn't really for him, but there is no direct bridge built from Eminem's footprint in rap to claiming Mac Miller would just be another dude if he was black. It's a sensationalist claim whose only connective tissue to the main topic is his personal opinion of Mac Miller's raps, and the fact that they're both white. Plenty of white dudes died on the vine in the 10s while Miller made music that reached a very specific and passionate demographic.
Jack Harlow is a much meatier target to throw underneath that bus, but because he's clearly a prodigy of Drake with almost zero DNA of Eminem's style of music and artistry, suppose it's harder to draw that parallel.
Point being Eminem is a unique megastar in hip hop canon. I thought FD would tie a complete knot around the heart of the matter as he kept bringing up the parallels between hardcore rap and metal/punk, inexorably linked by their iconoclastic energy (which he identifies by naming beastie boys and ratm). But he always tails off just enough so that the fact that Eminem was white remains the principal (or only) reason he had crossover appeal. like buddy I quoted up above and FD mentioned as the "I don't like rap but I love Eminem" gang, Eminem's antics and lyrics cut to the heart of turn of the century white angst. He could be the voice for both urban and suburban kids, motherfucking their parents who just didn't understand, and by proxy "the man" as well. He appealed to this wide range of ears, yes because he was white of course, but also because no one at the mainstream level was delivering his discordant energy with such technical ability. He practically existed outside of hip hop, even as a rapper. Perhaps the first huge pop or punk rapper if we want to label it.
It's why it's so easy to see how hip hop culture moved on with little to no stylistic remnants of Eminem's empire. He left an indelible mark in music but certainly not within hip hop itself, which is still a genre for and of the people. It's that fact more than anything that really anybody with a story to tell, even white folks, can try to write a 16. And while Eminem is widely lauded as a living legend and something of a made man in rap, it's curious to me that probably the biggest contemporary artist to carry forth Eminem's legacy is Kendrick Lamar, but he's not even mentioned in the video
But I guess kdot writing black Israelite raps makes that connection tricky to land
Best part of the video was the brief history of rap and naming a bunch of dudes I wasn't aware of, or hadn't heard in a long long time. That was fun
