On 'Jackman,' Jack Harlow is aggrieved and ready to let everyone hear about it
In a 2015 conversation with The Fader, Vince Staples and the late Mac Miller made a crucial distinction between white people that rap and "white rappers." "The genre of white rapper is not tight," Miller said. As someone who'd successfully transitioned from one category to the other, Miller's perspective felt especially pertinent. Both he and Staples were thinking of a white rapper as someone overperforming lyricism to compensate for a lack of cultural intelligence, but the underlying idea was that the white rapper was attempting assimilation and ultimately failing because he wasn't self-aware. Realistically, it's a sliding scale that is constantly shifting for each individual artist. More recently, Macklemore, who famously committed the most performatively self-aware act of white rapperism by publicly apologizing for robbing Kendrick Lamar at the 2014 Grammys, seemed to turn a corner toward the optimum form of rehabilitation: accepting and internalizing criticism. "Hip-hop is inclusive so there's always been an open door to a certain extent," he told CBS Mornings. "But I'm a guest, Em's a guest. Doesn't matter how good we get. Doesn't matter how great Eminem is. We're guests in the culture."
, of course, is the barometer by which all white rappers are measured. Surely, it must get annoying, but if you're a white person that raps you can't take the bait. To invite the comparison is to invite derision, and, by extension, classify yourself within . Doing so is one of many key mistakes made by the white rapper of the moment, . Originally a Kentucky-repping outsider, Harlow has reached a point where he's bought into his own hype, jumping from wide-eyed newcomer to self-perceived frontrunner. "Ya boy's strivin' to be the most dominant ever / The hardest white boy since the one who rapped about vomit and sweaters / And hold the comments 'cause I promise you I'm honestly better / than whoever came to your head right then," he raps on his new album, . Beset by outside criticism, he wants to get in front of classifications of his work, but he does it so clumsily that he comes off clueless, forgetting he hasn't earned the right to even define those parameters.
