I would say that headline would start a flamewar in the comments, but my articles don’t get them, so ha! Jokes on you, trolls! (*secretly sobs over no comments, realizing the joke is on him*)
Rah Digga, who I’m most familiar with from her iconic verses on the iconic, star-packed single “Touch It (Remix),” a Busta Rhymes song featuring Mary J. Blige, Rah Digga, Missy Elliot, Lloyd Banks, Papoose and DMX. Digga guested on radio station This Is 50 to speak on the state of the Hip Hop game and, while espousing her thoughts on Remy Ma’s release from jail, Nicki Minaj, and Iggy Azalea, she let it be known that she did not consider the Australian artist a contributor to hip hop.
The Touch It (Remix) music video. I honestly loved the colour scheme as a kid, and nothing’s changed.
When asked about Azalea, Rah Digga made it clear that she does not consider Azalea real hip-hop. Elaborating, she said that it just didn’t seem genuine to her, and for her to come from Australia and try to enter the hip hop game as though she knows about it is going to make people not believe in you.
“Iggy Azalea, I can’t really get into her. Because it’s just not real to me,” said Digga. “There is a white girl from Australia that spits in an Australian accent, and her name is Chelsea Jane. That I can get into. Teach me Australian Hip-Hop culture. Don’t come to America and try to convince me that you’re Gangsta Boo… We’re not going to believe you if you’re trying to convince us that you’re out here trap shooting.”
She continued to say that she understood where Nicki Minaj was coming from when her supposedly shady speech at 2014’s BET Awards. She is a firm believer in artists writing their own songs, and questions, “When did it become wrong to call out people that don’t write their own rhymes? When did that become a crime in Hip-Hop?”
Digga finished off by saying, “hip-hop is representative of this: to inform and empower inner city youth. I’m fine with anybody’s race, creed, or color participating, but don’t ever forget what it was created for in the first place.” When asked what she would call Azalea’s work, she was torn between labeling it as “hip pop” or “pop hop”.
Check out the full interview below:
Personally (since you all so desperately wanted my two and a half cents), I’m with Rah Digga on this one. Hip Hop was made by Blacks for their people and to inspire us from our current situation and make us aspire to be better, despite what society and others tell us. Still, we rise, and we are the most resilient and determined people the world has known.
And yet, despite repeatedly and insistently being discriminated, profiled and spurned as lesser and inferior, we have our culture stolen, appropriated, and parodied. We are told we are less than they are, yet they aspire to have our hair and our music and our ways.
It is the most problematic when even within our own culture and arts, we are bested by others. We invented hip hop and rap, and yet we have a white woman in Iggy Azalea being considered the best female rapper/hip-hop artist (hip-hopper?) for the moment, winning awards for her admittedly catchy single Fancy. We have Macklemore, an independent artist who unlike Kendrick Lamar, is not signed to a major label. Yet, like Kendrick, he was nominated for 7 awards at the Grammy’s, including Best New Artist, Song of The Year, and even Album of The Year. Not to mention Rap Album of the Year. Now, despite Kendrick having a very clear advantage in winning the Rap Album of the Year award by merit of being signed and Hip Hop being his culture, take a guess as to which of the pair won.
What is white privilege? It is the privilege of being the best at everything, even things that are not in your culture. It is the privilege to be able to be considered better at rap than the people who created it. It is the privilege to be awarded for appropriating others’ cultures, to literally be rewarded for wearing another’s culture like a costume or picking apart and choosing to represent the parts you like, regardless of meaning or how important it is to said people.
It is while people like Iggy Azalea and Macklemore, fresh into the game can be awarded and lauded as revolutionaries and inspirations for appropriating others’ cultures while people like Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar get dismissed and their efforts unacknowledged, or only merely referenced after years of hard work clawing to where they are now. Black people make themselves. White people have the luxury of being handed things. Obviously not all, but let’s not play coy about it either.
Omarosa once laid down the law to Bethenny, and it’s still true.
Papa Pope of Scandal told his daughter, Olivia, that she had to be “twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”
And Papa Pope gave another spectacular one to the President, Fitzgerald Grant III.
Rah Digga speaks to the truth that anyone of white descent or appearance can come from somewhere else (i.e. Australia) and immediately insert themselves into a foreign culture and be lauded and hailed revolutionaries, handed awards, and considered gifted and precious. All the while, they will complain about how it’s “hard or difficult for [them] as a white person in a predominantly-black game/profession“.
Case in point, in a world where everything is catered to white people, where most channels star white leads and even a single black-oriented channel in BET (where every single person will ask “well, why isn’t there a White Entertainment Television when there’s a Black Entertainment Television? Isn’t that, like, reverse racism?!” …Probably because every single other channel is catered to you?), where black folk want a single part of their culture to be theirs and a safe space from appropriation and cultural assimilation, people like Iggy Azalea and Macklemore come along, fuck shit up, and proclaim themselves the saviours and best in their respect arts.
Going back to what Rah Digga said, “hip-hop is representative of this: to inform and empower inner city youth.” Anyone wanna explain to me how thrift shopping and telling people you’re fancy is empowering inner city youth?
That said, I do enjoy music they put out. But I do see why it’s problematic, and I do agree with Rah Digga.
Do you?
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