Pop appropriation: why hip-hop loves Eminem but loathes Iggy Azalea

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/11/hip-hop-appropriation-eminem-iggy-azalea

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Amid the latest Kanye West saga – his demand that Beck renounce his Grammy for best album in favor of Beyoncé – the winner of this year’s Grammy for best rap album, Eminem, hasn’t been talked about much. It’s not because his winning work, The Marshall Mathers 2 LP, was so amazing, because it wasn’t. It’s because, in a subpar category, Eminem’s latest served as the bulwark against Iggy Azalea’s The New Classic – a victory that would have been, in the opinion of most tastemakers, a catastrophe of Milli Vanilli proportions.

To be sure, the Grammys are too white. As Kris Ex wrote for Complex, opening the show with AC/DC was like “the planting of a great, Viagra-stiff, Dad Rock flag emblazoned with the words ‘Fuck You’ via arthritic hands”. Not to mention that, at a time when the sound of pop music is very black, the artists performing those sounds, as least the most popular ones, are very likely to be white. From Miley to Iggy to Macklemore, the concept of black appropriation came to the surface again this year, everywhere from Azealia Banks’s Twitter feed to glossy magazine think pieces.

On the subject of Macklemore, the Seattle rapper’s victory over Kendrick Lamar last year was seen as an epic calamity – not just because Lamar is black, but because his 2012 album Good Kid, Maad City was a once-in-a-generation work. At least Macklemore had the good sense to feel bad about the whole thing.

Related: Iggy Azalea v Papa John's: has feral fan culture gone too far?

At the 2015 Grammys, Eminem himself took an award away from more deserving black performers, but it was for best rap/sung collaboration, winning for The Monster with Rihanna over Tuesday (ILoveMakonnen featuring Drake) and Bound 2 (Kanye featuring Charlie Wilson). The best rap album category, on the other hand, was undeniably weak. Run the Jewels 2 came out too late in the year to be eligible, and the works that did make the cut – from otherwise compelling artists Schoolboy Q, Common and Wiz Khalifa – were not their makers’ best.

For sure, The Marshall Mathers 2 LP’s victory may have been another case of a glorified lifetime achievement award, similar to the best actor Oscar finally awarded to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman. (The Grammys’ 2001 decision to give album of the year to Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature rather than Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, after all, requires unceasing penance.)

But the main reason people aren’t complaining about Eminem’s victory is that, quite simply, he has unequivocally demonstrated his love for hip-hop as a culture and a genre. He long ago recognized his white privilege (“If I was black I would have sold half”) and committed himself to the old-fashioned aesthetic of masterful lyricism. That he became the world’s biggest pop star almost seemed like an accident, whereas with Iggy Azalea it seems to be the main goal.

Still, it’s not Azalea’s success that most critics have a problem with. It’s that she often seems to be appropriating aspects of the culture (from her lyrical tropes to her patois) without putting in the hard work – and, further, that she has refused to be introspective in the wake of criticism from folks like Banks.

At this point, about the only thing Eminem and Azalea have in common is that they’re both white rappers. Eminem has blended into the hip-hop landscape thoroughly enough to nearly transcend race. For Azalea, however, race remains her primary identifier.