NYTimes.com

By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: November 20, 2003


Hip-hop listening sessions are usually pretty dull affairs. It's hard to enjoy any hip-hop album when you're trapped in a conference room with a bunch of media professionals. But when executives from The Source, a hip-hop magazine, asked reporters to attend a listening session on Tuesday night, they weren't expecting people to have a good time. "This is a very important evening," said David Mays, the magazine's co-founder and chief executive. And then, through some rather feeble speakers, he played a profoundly poor hip-hop track from about a decade ago, maybe longer.

The track is by Eminem, and it sounds like a free style, not a song. Like much of his best and best-known work, this rant castigates an untrustworthy ex-girlfriend. But in this case the ex-girlfriend is black, and the rhymes are full of crude racial taunts. "Black girls only want your money," he says more than once. And early on he lays out his conclusions in sweeping (and inept) language:

Black girls and white girls just don't mix
Because black girls are dumb and white girls are good chicks
White girls are good, I like white girls
I like white girls all over the world
White girls are fine and they blow my mind
And that's why I'm here now, telling you this rhyme
'Cause black girls, I really don't like.

Even before the news conference had begun, Eminem had released a statement acknowledging that the words were his but calling them "foolishness," the sound of a spurned boyfriend venting his "anger, stupidity and frustration."

But the executives from The Source argued that this newly unearthed recording (provided to them, they say, by three white hip-hop fans from Detroit) is a mountain, not a molehill. Kim Osorio, the magazine's editor in chief, said, "These are racist remarks by someone who has the ability to influence millions of minds."

Eminem has spent much of his career earning fans by making enemies, and a casual observer might wonder how this new controversy differs from ones in which the rapper was accused of homophobia and misogyny — accusations that only helped broaden his fame.

The difference is that because he is a white rapper, Eminem has gone out of his way to avoid showing disrespect to African-Americans. He is always reverential to his mentor, Dr. Dre (even when he's joking about killing Dre in a song), and he has been effusive in his praise of 50 Cent, who records for Eminem's label, Shady Records. When listing his favorite rappers, he once ranked himself ninth, behind eight African-American counterparts.

When Eminem jokes about race, he is usually joking about his own, and he has made a point of avoiding hip-hop's most popular racial slur. This avoidance even served as the punch line to one of his jokes: in his song "Criminal," he rhymes, "I drink malt liquor to [mess] you up quicker/ Than you'd wanna [mess] me up for saying the word . . ." — and there's an empty space where the epithet would be. But at Tuesday's news conference, in a Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan, the magazine's executives played a shorter snippet of a different, unreleased track on which a rapper they identified as Eminem uses the word while explaining, in passing, which "girls" he likes and which he doesn't.

These revelations will undoubtedly give Eminem's detractors more reason to dislike him, but they probably won't much bother his hardcore fans. Although much has been made of Eminem's hip-hop credibility, the truth is that for the past few years a number of hip-hop fans — especially black hip-hop fans — seem to have been losing interest in the rapper, who never seemed comfortable in any community, not even the hip-hop community. His music still hews closely to hip-hop's beats-and-rhymes blueprint, but his persona comes straight out of rock 'n' roll: the sullen loner, the paranoid rebel.

In all of this, the main complicating factor is that The Source is far from a neutral observer. The dominating presence at the news conference was that of Benzino Scott, a less-than-successful rapper who is listed on the magazine's masthead as "Co-Founder and Chief Brand Executive." Mr. Scott has been embroiled in a feud with Eminem, and the dispute has spilled into the pages of the magazine.

The February 2003 issue included an illustration of Mr. Scott holding Eminem's severed head. The March issue kept up the attack, calling Eminem an "infiltrator" who has continued the sad legacy of the much-derided white rapper Vanilla Ice. In a roundtable in the same issue, Mr. Scott blamed MTV: "I believe MTV was like a male basically takin' hip-hop, havin' sex with her, pushin' her off, pimpin' her and after that havin' the baby by her. We all know who the baby is: Eminem."

Eminem himself would probably agree with this last criticism. He has admitted in songs and interviews that his race has a lot to do with his huge success. "Do the math, if I was black, I would have sold half," he once rhymed. But while he acknowledges the power of racism, he doesn't make apologies for having figured out a way to work the system.

In his own verses, Mr. Scott tends to express his views of Eminem (born Marshall Mathers) less delicately. In "Die Another Day," he rhymes, "You dyed your hair blond, I'm a make it red/ How you gon' sell records, Marshall, when you're dead?" Later, after casting aspersions about Eminem's sexuality, he adds, "I'm a king, you a little punk/ You the rap David Duke, the rap Hitler/ The culture-stealer." In the context of lyrics like these, the revelation of Eminem's race-baiting recordings seems less like high-minded journalism and more like the continuation of yet another hip-hop feud.

Still, the tapes exist, and Eminem has acknowledged recording at least one of the tracks; if people with more credibility than Mr. Scott start speaking up against him, he may be forced to issue a more substantive apology. In the meantime, though, the magazine vows to press on: Mr. Scott said he planned to distribute the newly unearthed recordings with the February issue.