The Middle of Nowhere #21

On Gatekeeping, Conservatism, Consumerism, and That One Lil Yachty Song With The White Rapper

Welcome back. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself indulging into something I absolutely loathe: dialogue. But in my classic instincts, I like looking at the large picture rather than the empty noise. Forget all the mundanity of industry plant conversations or easter eggs in music videos. I want to interrogate you. The reader, the general audience, myself even. Why do we do the things we do with our consumer? If we know better, shouldn’t we do better?

In that sense, I find myself trying to crack a conundrum in my mind: the white rapper. Moreover, what’s the next move in this upcoming crossroads? On one hand, we have the re-emergence of gatekeeping. They not like us and what not. On the other, there’s this gluttonous instinct to hear things out. Does it work? If so, why does it work in spite of evidence to the contrary? And why does a stupid fuckin’ Lil Yachty song spawn existential quandaries about our morals and consumerism? I’m hellbent on trying to figure all this out. 

Ian, The Demoralization of Drake, & The Rise of Gatekeeping and Conservatism

Ian is a confusing artist. Without any knowledge of who he is or what he looks like, he works. If you’re starved for faux Gucci Mane or wondered why the new Playboi Carti rollout stopped, Ian fills the void. “That pistol he totin’ is Airsoft, he don’t do nun but act tough for them cameras” are the kind of raps that make you beat your chest. 

‘Hate Me’ further proves that Ian’s shtick works in a vacuum. “Weddin’ cake in my blunt with no bride yet, if I face me another, I’ll die here” and “Fell in love with the Cullinan parked outside, bitch wait til you see the garage” is rich shit talk on a ’05 Shawty Redd type beat glitched in 2012 Clams Casino ambiance. His raps fit like a glove for a lot of the best street rappers and modern day flexers. 

Then you see Ian’s face. You see his cleanly shaven, smooth butt chin. The fratty curls, the rapper attire on Pinterest. His voice doesn’t match the vendor it comes from. There is seemingly no ambiguity here either. A little research takes you on a journey of cynical marketing, digital pandering, and skin crawling smarminess. This isn’t the work of a person, this is the work of a studious game plan, a diabolical Kyle Shanahan-esque playbook. It’s the natural escalation of Donald Glover’s Atlanta introducing the idea of the YWA (Young White Avatar).

I know the natural inclination is to shake your fist in the air and yell ‘white people!’ In normal circumstances, I’d chop him up alongside the Yung Gravy, Since99 types. ‘Teehee, that’s ironic, he’s white but it’s actually kind of hard!’ kind of approach. These people disappear once a year and replacements come at least twice annually. A little backlash meets a little disinterest and we repeat the cycle. Usually, this isn’t worth thinking about. However, it strikes me as odd that a verse from an otherwise vacuous, cynical artist sounds relatively inspired. Moreover, it really doesn’t seem right that the admittance of a good verse comes with a healthy slice of ‘culture vulture.’

Forgive me, I need to talk about the exhausting rap beef everyone is still talking about for a second. “Not Like Us” is a lot of things. It’s the dismissal of an alleged pedophile. It serves as a humbling from Kendrick and the industry to the biggest rapper of the last decade and change. It certainly holds the potential to withdraw Drake from the throne he ravenously lusts over. It declares that no ‘outsider’ can hold real estate in a culture not fit for them. It’s also deeply ironic. 

Gatekeepers don’t really exist anymore. We used to live in a world where respected tastemakers offer new competitors to the world. Then, we’d accept them or deny them accordingly. Or they’d stick around through the sheer stubborn will of label investment, payola to the tastemaker, and restless market. Regardless, it was a pretty healthy ecosystem. 

Then, the internet happens. Soulja Boy subverts the middle man entirely by getting music straight to the people via the digital market. When mixtapes stop becoming a primary byproduct of street teams, guys like Wale can drop tapes revolving around Seinfeld bits and 90s sitcom kookiness straight to mixtape sites like Datpiff. Blogs start to become breaking points for new artists over the traditional mediums. After a while, there was no need for the tastemakers to tell people what’s cool or not. We could do that for ourselves. 

In the immediate aftermath of Kanye West smoking 50 Cent out of the way with Graduation, artists like Drake appear freely. Gatekeepers might’ve squinted before at a Canadian actor turned full time rapper with a Charmin soft singing voice. There’s no shame in not fitting the mold of before. A polo wearing backpacker can pose in a bear costume on album covers and be the king of the world. It doesn’t matter anymore. The gate is open. 

Kendrick Lamar comes up around the same time and he acts as the inverse. He believes in the sanctity of rap’s glorious ecosystem through a stringent set of rules. He abides by industry practices, strives for prestige through the aura of importance and competitive exhibitions. Dot feels like he’s the best and anyone contesting him will be shown that not everyone deserves to be here.

Fast forward through an extremely trivial cold war by a soft dork and a small nerd, we arrive to chants of ‘they not like us.’ It’s not enough that he hangs around a bunch of strange, problematic people. It’s not enough that he plays the beef like a dummy, falling for easy moves and allowing Kendrick to use his own playbook against him. Hell, it’s not even enough that Drake is an alleged pedophile here. No, Kendrick preys on the one thing Drake always felt insecure about: he’s dying for respect and to feel like he belongs. 

Kendrick says what everyone has always looked at Drake weirdly over. He adopts the many beautiful stylings in hip-hop throughout its many regions. Kendrick specifically name drops Atlanta but it’s applicable from Houston to Memphis, LA to NY, the Bay to the UK. Hell, people were even saying Drake was biting Smino’s style for a bit because of their hair. Kendrick’s smoking gun is that through Drake’s attempt to be Shang Tsung and be everything, everywhere all at once renders him to be a culture vulture. He has nothing to hold onto, therefore he scrambles for credibility everywhere else. 

I find the audience applauding so quickly to be very convenient. Not to defend Drake because he did embrace so many styles that there’s barely a Canadian left in there anymore. But it begs a glaring question. If we hate how Drake embodies different styles so freely, why do we liberally share them? If he’s not like us, why is Ian still around? If 'they not like us', what is with this insistence on listening anyway? Why is culture so liberally spread around if we worry how it’s invoked?

I have a working conspiracy theory. Last month, I flew to Atlanta, Georgia and perched inside a restaurant in Marietta. Here, I met my friends Alex and Yoh and I proposed an idea. We’re coming close to the “new white man.” We’re on the verge of shedding the dominant, Chet Hanks-ish white guy, where Black aesthetic is mindlessly co-opted until it’s virtually unrecognizable. It’s not as actively and purposefully parasitic as it is roughly adjacent to white life and adopted by secondhand nature. If this is a strong representation of what’s around them, naturally, they embody it in their own clumsy sort of way. 

Now, people grow increasingly weary of this experience. Nothing distinctly belongs to anyone anymore because it’s all a shared experience now. Because we instinctively want to share communally, everything is liberally dispatched amongst the larger crowd. ‘That seems cool, I want to try it.’ This should be a beautiful thing and yet, it spirals into sloppy recreations to be sold and duplicated until no one wants it anymore. The pattern continues forever. 

Conversely, where the Tyler Herro types slowly wane, the ‘new white man’ slowly emerges.  Living in Austin, Texas and working for a country/middle American type website allows me firsthand observation into the phenomenon. Americans, particularly a lot of white people, have slowly begun to cover themselves in Carhartt jackets, RealTree camo, and silly mustaches. Americana is sold and pre-packaged until everyone tries their hand at Zach Bryan, Jelly Roll, and Morgan Wallen (ideally without the racial slurs but with all the drunken yearning) variants.

The appeal seems to connect with some of the more mundane aspects of modern American living. Shed the depressing factor of capitalism and the unfathomable levels of death at all times, there is something at the core of the USA. This country can genuinely be beautiful, particularly in its rural aspects. A cold beer after work, the unity in a bar atmosphere, serenity in the country when there is so much noise elsewhere. Basically, this is just trying to distill Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA.’ 

Evidently, white people are trying to find themselves. Or, more accurately, they’re embracing the parts of themselves not fully unlocked in favor of devouring Black culture. In the cases of the aforementioned Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen, they love Keith Whitley and George Strait just as much as they adore Kevin Gates or Lil Wayne. Think less Kid Rock and more country-fried Eminem types. They still don face tattoos and turn up when they hear a big rap song. Now, they stop grappling with their own identity crises and embrace who they really are. 

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This all ushers in the new era of conservatism. White people restore their commonalities with modern day country and Americana. Kendrick encourages the walls being built between those bred in hip-hop versus those who don’t instinctually speak the language. Everyone retreats to their own bubbles again.

This doesn’t even mention America’s rabid blood lust, the uproar in favor of Donald Trump’s witchcraft (grifting) or the spike in the male gaze shifting towards something even beyond plain misogyny. All of that is obvious. ‘Not Like Us’ demonstrates a new aspect of conservative thinking: Skepticism in sharing spaces with one another. 

Liberalism itself conflicts with the notions of gatekeeping. In a liberal world, hip-hop is a joint experience that we embrace together. Should we not come together and embrace the beauty of the genre and the culture it creates? Conversely, in its gross capital, boundaries are exploited and true ownership is lost. Ian gets to roam around these spaces and galavant his whiteness in these spaces while performing Playboi Carti impersonations. It’s not hard to understand why gatekeeping is the next big solution. We're all deeply terrified of losing something we built.

Still, I reckon this isn’t the answer because we’ve seen what happens. By putting the power back in the hands of gatekeepers and assigned tastemakers, it inherently strips the power away from the free market. It’s not hard to identify how easy it is to exploit this power dynamic. At some point . We don’t establish any boundaries between ourselves and what’s sold. We’ve assimilated as one with the marketplace, more of an inevitable prophecy than a functional relationship.

Eventually, we desperately need a measure of principle in our consumption. Given how malleable (and just bad, frankly) a lot of taste is in people, it’s essential to nip our inclinations in the bud. What these industries want from us is to engage with what they’re selling. It doesn’t even matter if you buy or not. You’re acting as the marketer for them. It doesn’t matter if you buy. A far more neutral person can be easily persuaded. But they don’t see it if you aid the process in its visibility. We are the beholders of our consumption. They sell to us, we don’t buy from them.

It surprised me that all of my world observations crystalized over an Ian feature. I mean, who cares? Surely, there will be another Ian type figure in our future and social media will do this little song and dance once again. It’s a seemingly endless pattern. When are we tired of hearing shit out because it’s ‘kinda hard?’ At what point do we give this shit up?

Ultimately, I found myself kind of cold to that Ian feature because the visual does matter a little bit. He kind of strikes me as a Milli Vanilli type of situation, where he’s merely the vessel for something we might instinctually embrace. But sometimes, we have to shoot the messenger, even if we aren’t mad at the message.

Gatekeeping isn’t inherently the answer either. All this does is shift who’s selling you the bullshit. Take your pick between a legion of marketers or a full conglomerate. They’re still going to ask you the same question: Are you copping? If neither side leaves us less than fulfilled, we do have a secret third option they don’t want us to choose: just say no. We aren’t obligated to engage with or accept anything they sell us. The whims of the market doesn’t speak for us nor should they have any basis in our identities. Rather, it’s imperative to remember the agency we have. Maybe then we’ll be able to shed ourselves of pesky white guys in baggy SouthPole shorts.