Poor White Blight: How Rapper Yelawolf (and Eminem Before Him) Turns Hip-Hop's Eye to the Trailer Park
A few weeks ago, I was really hot in the biscuit to write about Yelawolf. And even though his album was not that good, it made me think about a lot of things, especially my own personal experiences among the largely white poverty in upstate New York. I wrote about it.
It’s interesting to compare Eminem, self-affirmed “trailer trash pioneer,” with Kanye West and Jay-Z, who jointly released an album touting their material success. Watch The Throne was notable even within a genre full of albums touting one’s material success. Eminem, who enjoyed a hugely successful 2010, and earned about $14 million, rarely talks about it on his records. The way he constantly touts his low-class background makes you think he still eats fast food and shops at K-Mart. Maybe he does; I have no idea.
Even though I’ve written at length about why it’s good for people of color to be successful, and unabashed about their success, it seems just as valid to note that Yelawolf and Eminem give significantly more voice to the 99 percent than any peoples’ mic or drum circle. A tiny minority of students, protesters and journalists are now enjoying the sort of rough treatment that rural poor folk (and minorities) have dealt with for decades. Eminem’s verse certainly doesn’t try to overturn the financial system from outside. The interesting affect of it is that, even though he’s part of the 1 percent, Eminem channels populist rage from within its own framework.
Being wealthy is never, in the abstract, normatively bad. In fact, I’d wager most people dream of the good they could do with some money. But wealth is moving, inexorably maybe, in the other direction. And people know that, but it seems not to stick. TV, movies and music are still dominated by so-called upper-middle-class people. When someone is poor, they’re usually a person of color. Yelawolf’s music puts the lie to that obvious misrepresentation. If most people in America are solidly in the lower class, and most people in America are white, well, it stands to reason that most people in America are poor and white. Turning on the TV, you’d never know it though.
