Who Does Hip-Hop Belong To?

By MICHAEL GONCHAR

After Sunday’s Grammy Awards, Macklemore sent a public apology via text to Kendrick Lamar, whom he had just beaten out for best rap album. Macklemore, who is white, bested four black musicians, including Mr. Lamar, in winning his award in this historically black music genre. Should Macklemore be apologizing? Did he “rob” the other award contenders? Is this just another example of whites appropriating and profiting from historically black music, as some might sayElvis Presley and other early rock ’n’ roll musicians did in the 1950s? Can music transcend race or ethnicity to belong to its fans? Or is our history too scarred by inequality?

Who does hip-hop belong to?

In the article “Finding a Place in the Hip-Hop Ecosystem,” Jon Caramanica writes about Macklemore’s text, and the complex context in which it lives.

A couple of hours after the Grammys on Sunday night, Macklemore sent a text to Kendrick Lamar, whom he had just beaten out for best rap album.

“You got robbed,” the text read. “I wanted you to win. You should have. It’s weird.” He added, “I robbed you.”

As a private act, this was a love letter, a way for an artist to honor a peer. As a public act — Macklemore posted an image of the text on his Instagram account, although it’s unclear whether it was with Mr. Lamar’s knowledge — it was a cleansing and an admission of guilt. Not only did Macklemore want to show respect to his fellow rapper, he wanted the world to know that he understands his place in the hip-hop ecosystem and that he is still careful where he steps.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, the Seattle duo that has spent the last year upending the rules about how hip-hop interacts with mainstream pop, won four Grammys on Sunday night, for best new artist and in three rap categories (best performance and best song for “Thrift Shop” and best album for “The Heist”).

The rap awards were the most tortured, for artists and observers alike. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have experienced a very peculiar sort of hip-hop fame, one that has little to do with approval from the center of hip-hop, and it has unfolded largely without black gatekeepers, a traditional hallmark of white rappers through the years. Instead Macklemore & Ryan Lewis jumped straight from the independent hip-hop underground to the pop charts, which has left them scrambling to shore up their bona fides retroactively.

So when he bests Mr. Lamar — and Jay Z, Drake and Kanye West — for a rap award, he makes sure he kisses the ring. “I robbed you” is a strikingly powerful phrase in this context: a white artist muscling into a historically black genre, essentially uninvited, and taking its laurel. This is the entire cycle of racial borrowing in an environment of white privilege in a nutshell: black art, white appropriation, white guilt, repeat until there’s nothing left to appropriate.

Now You Go: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Who does hip-hop belong to?
• Are white artists who prosper in hip-hop robbing from black musicians? Or is music fair game for all true fans?
• Is the history of white privilege — think of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s — continuing with Macklemore’s Grammy Award for best rap album?
• Should Macklemore be apologizing? Is his apology sincere? Is it appropriate?
• Can rap music ever transcend race and class? Or is it too indelibly tied to black urban culture?