Other People's Property

(Ok, so I just submitted this to Rapreviews, only to realize that Adam Bernard had reviewed it a while back. I also didn't realize that it came out in 07. I'm kind of dumb sometimes).

“Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America,” by Jason Tanz, Bloomsbury USA

Reviewed by Patrick Taylor

The hip hop generation is hardly the first to look to African American culture for cool. The jazzheads of the twenties did the same thing on their trips to Harlem to see musicians who weren’t even allowed into white clubs; the Beats’ kinetic writing was fueled by bebop, and their hipster slang borrowed heavily from African American slang; white rock n’ rollers blatantly stole the art form from the African Americans, and in the sixties British rockers like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones revisited classic blues as a font for authenticity. Clearly, white hip hop fans are only the most recent in a long line of white folks diving into the pool of African American art and music.

“Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America” is an attempt by Jason Tanz to explore the complicated relationship between white kids and hip hop. Tanz, a journalist who writes for “Fortune Small Business,” grew up in a white and middle class suburb in Washington. For Tanz, hip hop was an escape from his parents’ love of sixties counterculture, as well as a way to try to better understand African American culture and overcome the racism that has marred US history since Columbus first set eyes on the New World. He got a rude awakening at how African American fans felt about his love of their culture when he was mocked for wearing a Malcom X hat, and called a white devil by the Digable Planets at a concert.

Early in the book, Tanz takes a tour of the South Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop. His tour guide is Rahiem, part of the Furious Five, and among his fellow tourists is DJ Gummo, a white kid from Orange County who is desperate to connect with the culture he has adopted. Gummo tries to impress Rahiem with his knowledge of hip hop history, but ultimately, he is a tourist like everyone else on the bus, visitors to an exotic place that they will never be a part of.

Gummo is what Tanz calls a “Wegroe” a term he uses for white hip hop fans who hope that rap music will help them to overcome their whiteness, and bridge the gap between white and black. Wegroes include people like MC Serch and the Young Black Teenagers: well-meaning whites who desperately want to be part of a African American culture. Tanz is sympathetic towards the Wegroes, but clearly sees their quest to rise above their white privilege as ultimately hopeless.

Then there are the wiggers, a truly hateful term for whites who dress and act gangsta. Tanz interviews Johnny Crack, a twerpy white kid whose ultraviolent, ultra-offensive gangsta rap is total fantasy. Crack, like most wiggers, is derided by blacks as wanna-be’s, and derided by whites for affecting the dress and mannerism of a culture that isn’t theirs. (Implicit in the term “wigger,” as in “white nigger,” is the disapproval of aping a culture that is seen as being inferior to white. Make no mistake, wigger is a racist term.) Tanz’s main problem with wiggers, other than the fact that they are utterly ridiculous, is that their appropriation of black culture doesn’t involve any real respect or admiration. It’s all about borrowing the machismo and swagger of hip hop without having any real love for the culture.

While his analysis of wegroes and wiggers is interesting, Tanz loses the plot a little when he talks about nerdcore. The term is used to describe rappers like MC Frontalot or mc chris (sic), white rappers who rap about geek culture for a predominately white audience. I wish Tanz would have spent less time with such a marginal group within hip hop, and more time on people like El-P or Aesop rock, white rappers who have actually been successful in creating hip hop that is true to the spirit of the culture. I also wish Tanz had spent some time discussing other genres of hip hop that attract predominantly white audiences, and what effect that has on African-American artists. He could have also had a chapter on how mainstream (white) music journalists view hip hop, and what effect their perception of what hip hop is and should be has on the music.

My biggest issue with “Other People’s Property” is that Tanz never explains what he think whites’ role in hip hop should be. Should we sag our jeans and call each other “dawg?” Or should we just feel guilty? There has to be some solution that allows whites to participate in the culture without pretending to be something they are not, and without totallyaltering the art form to fit our tastes. At its core, hip hop is a better reflection of the multi-ethnic world than all-white genres like rock. It is popular with white suburban kids not just because they want to gleam some of the coolness and swagger from it, but because artists like Kanye West or Lil Wayne seem more relevant than Nickleback or the Beatles.


"Other People's Property" is an ambitious attempt to analyze how white people fit into hip hop. Tanz deserves credit for tackling such a loaded and multi-layered issue. White hip hop fan should at least give the book a scan, although some readers might be turned off by the grad school prose. Tanz ultimately leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and the book could have been a lot longer than its meager two hundred pages. In the end, "Other People's Property" works best as a starting-off point for what deserves to be a much larger discussion of what it means to be a white rap enthusiast.


Content: 7.5 of 10 Readability: 7 of 10 Total: 7 of 10