Thank You, Hip Hop

As I Release My Third and Final Full Length Album: 7 Life Lessons Being a White Rapper Taught Me

Most dreams start in High School. Most dreams die there.

I was one of the foolish ones who thought, “sure, let’s keep this going”, mostly due to a few, well-received performances in which I forgot most of my lyrics and freestyle-mumbled my way through the verses.

My forgetfulness, and half rhyme, half freestyling approach succeeding should have been a red flag that the standards of my high school classmates might not be as high as the general public at a corner bar on a random Wednesday night.

But that’s not something you can learn from High School.

That’s something you have to learn from Hip Hop.

Or, I should say, that is something that Hip Hop is more than happy to teach a white boy from Milwaukee.

Through The Fire

Sophomore year of high school.

Milwaukee Public Schools is asking kids to submit original poetry.

The “best” 50 poems submitted, which, in Milwaukee, might have just been the “only” 50 poems submitted, would get published in a collection of “The Best, or Maybe, Only 50 – 100 Poems, Jordan Can’t Quite Remember, High School Students in Milwaukee Submitted To Us”.

A select few, or maybe every one, of the published poets would then be invited to a slam contest at a local public library.

There were many things about the late 90s and early 2000’s we probably wouldn’t recognize today.

One of those things was that a disproportionately high amount of white boys my age skateboarded.

Another was slam poetry.

We were the kind of kids who watched Slam at parties, bought everything Saul Williams sold, and begged our parents to let us watch Def Poetry Jam.

Ok, maybe that venn diagram of “we” and “I” were two totally separate circles, but it was undeniable that slam poetry, partially fueled by the rise of Neo Soul, was having a moment at the turn of the millennia.

On that school night, in that library, I did not win.

I did not go onto the next round.

One of the winners of the night was a poem and performance I still remember.

“Chicken Scratch” was a stream-of-conscious one sentence poem that lasted a paragraph and the young woman who performed it did so with a level of energy you would not have been able to glean from the page.

Her performance put her over the top.

I would say this was a lesson I learned that night, but to be honest it would take me years to learn the deeper truth of lesson 1: performers can be made, but not all can be made performers.

Instead, I would learn two actual lessons that night…in the parking lot.

As I was leaving the Capitol Drive library with my parents, somewhat dejected, a young black man, older than me by enough years for teenage-me to inherently look up to – and be intimidated – by, took a moment out of his night to catch up to us and get my attention, “hey man, I like your stuff, for real” and as he walked ahead of me, he turned back with a gesture I can still see as I write this, his hand holding an invisible pen to paper, he scribbled in the air and said, “just keep writing…keep writing” with a smile on his face and an enthusiasm that felt genuine to even a depressed, poetry-inclined teenager.

Those lessons were,

• Lesson 2. Keep Writing
• Lesson 3. Black Men You Never Met Will Be The Most Encouraging People You’ve Ever Met

The latter sounds flippant, but I can promise you, it is very flip.

No one goes out of their way to compliment an outfit, a shirt, your girlfriend (lol), like black men.

Throughout my life, after my performances at slam poetry open mics, or at parties, young black men I had never met would take a second to offer encouragement or congratulations.

I know this can sound like I’m stereotyping but I promise you no other people have done this in my life.

Not even, no other group of people. No other single person in my life, who has never seen or met me before, has ever randomly provided me unsolicited compliments or encouragement.

I was once walking, blearingly hungover, to get a lox bagel in Brooklyn (you have to ask for the tomotoes, onions, and capers or you will ONLY get cream cheese and salmon), wearing a mesh, old-school Brewers jersey when a man, unprompted, blurted, “hey”, and as I turned to face him, “I like your shirt man”.

“Thanks man!” I said, cigarette shaky, vomit barely contained.

His approach was abrupt, but his enthusiasm was one I had learned long ago was not sarcastic.

If you’ve ever skateboarded in a major American city you know how much young black kids will stop what they’re doing, watch what you’re doing, and if you pull off a trick, will not only compliment you, but will probably get more excited about your trick than you get.

You Being “One Of The Good Ones” Is Not The Point

I write, therefore, I am self-absorbed.

Self-absorption is often thought of as a form of arrogance.

But that arrogance, many times, can be just a part of the swirling cocktail of volatility that is self-absorption.

My self-absorption is social anxiety turned inwards.

Researchers at the University of Maryland scanned the brains of 12-year-olds while they performed a task, finding that the children became hypersensitive towards making errors when others were watching.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/social-anxiety-fear-making-mistakes-04232/

Because the children are too focused on one’s perceived mistakes in social situations, social anxiety follows. Essentially, this may be evidence of a neurobehavioral mechanism linking behavioral inhibition to adolescent social anxiety symptoms and diagnosis.

I spent a lot of nights waiting to go on stage, or in the crowd of a local show that was being hyped as mandatory.

I shared the stage with a lot of rappers I admired, and spotted more in the crowds of others’ sets.

At a 7th Street Entry Mujah Messiah release show my alcohol saturated attempt at shaking Greg Grease’s hand, and the resulting mumbling of, “i LIkE yOuR rApPiNg” resulted in an interaction I would call “confusing”.

I was able to book Tribe & Big Cats for a release show at Icehouse, but my foray into the green room was so awkward, so doused in marijuana paranoia, the resulting flush of embarassment rising so quickly, I didn’t stay longer than a minute.

To say I wasn’t cut out for networking of this type is an understatement.

In all these situations, I was so focused on how I was being perceived, my faculties overwhelmed with the possibility of making a mistake, that there was no chance of being in the moment, much less making a genuine connection with someone I had just met.

While my social anxiety is self-absorption gone wrong, one of its benefits – which like so many things about self-absorption, often backfires to the detriment of the absorbed, and really, everyone around them – is that I am often thinking about what it means to be a white man in the world.

This is something that spending time in Hip Hop reinforces, or I should say, if you’re a white person who spends any time in Hip Hop you need to spend some of that time thinking about race in America.

Not thinking about being a white man is one of the fundamental pillars of white male privilege, but just thinking about being a white man doesn’t mean you don’t get all the other privileges that your luck of birth provided you.

Acknowledging your privileges doesn’t exempt you from them.

What’s even more, is that, as good as it is for white people to think about race, even this can backfire.

• Lesson 3. As A White Man You Have A Responsibility To Think About Race.
• Lesson 4. But The Point Of That Rumination Is Not To Prove You Are One Of The Good Ones.

As a white boy growing up in Milwaukee Public Schools in the early 90s I remember the King riots, Martin, and the Black Is Beautiful movement vividly.

I was often one of only a couple white boys in my grade.

This fact, combined with the aforementioned social anxiety, meant I was thinking about race, and what it meant for me to be white, in ways:

• all black people are forced to,
• (usually starting at ages much younger than could ever be considered fair)
• and that most white people never have to in their entire lives
• (much less, starting as kids).

As this anxiety, and awareness, of my whiteness grew with my age, it turned into a potentially toxic obsession: wanting black people to know that I was “one of the good ones”, that I got it, and that I even knew how much I could never “get” it because as Claudine Rankin writes in “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning”,

Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

The fact I was already nervous talking to everyone I met, meant that my ability to convey how cool, how liberal, how caring I was about the black experience, in any interaction, was going to be an impossibility.

And even worse – to me – was the idea that, not only would I not be able to convey my downness, my social anxiety would instead cause me to convey the opposite.

As you may have noticed, I was concerned with how I would appear to black people.

This is not the problem in America.

I was conscious of race sure, but I was still self-absorbed.

As empathetic as I am to my younger self, the next step white people need to make – after first acknowledging their whiteness, and then walking around awhile with that newfound discomfort – is to remove their own ego from their understanding of race.

The problem of race in America is first and foremost the safety of black and brown people, and secondly, but inextricably linked to the first, their economic stability.

And yes, (I can hear the white backlash now) the safety of white people is important, but violence towards people of color is legitimized by the power system of America, where violence experienced by white people can find its rectification in that system.

As far as White Person Finding It Hard To Convey How Woke They Are To Black People, that might not even crack the Hot 100 issues of Race In America.

He’s Dreaming

Hip Hop is the inverse of America, as, in the world of Hip Hop the black male experience is given priority.

It was undoubtedly valuable to my character, to my soul as a white person, to exist and spend time in a space where my whiteness was not an advantage.

But on a personal level Hip Hop also taught me the final two lessons I will share.

• Lesson 6. You Are Not The Things You Like
• Lesson 7. No One Can Take It From You, If You Know What It Is

Ever since High School I wanted to rap because I loved writing raps and making music.

Being a successful hip hop artist is so competitive that unless you are 111% that dude, you are not going to make it.

I am, maybe, 75% that dude?

• I am a socially anxious, overly-analytical polish-german-norwegian descendant born and raised in the midwest with no connections to the music industry.
• I have no interest in performing.
• I have the opposite of interest in performing: intense dread.
• I am not innately adept at networking in a Hip Hop world.
• I am white.
• The music I’ve made is good. But again, Hip Hop is so competitive that only the best 1% of music makers can make a career on the basis of their music alone.

Ok, maybe less than 75%.

Hip Hop is a large part of who I am, but who I am is larger than Hip Hop.

Partly because I think no one can be fully defined by one form of artistic expression, but also because I have grown to learn that I am, first and foremost, a writer.

As it relates to Hip Hop, that is something no one can ever take from me.

The hours alone in my room, or apartment, figuring out the next bar, the next verse, the next hook, were a spiritual experience that probably saved my life.

The catharsis and excitement an unexpected rhyme, once found, provided me, was enough to keep me writing, and dreaming, for years.

Rapping was a release from the social anxiety I lived with every day, and a way, I felt, to find absolution from all the failures that arose from that anxiety.

I know what Me, As A Rapper looks like.

I know the first impressions people have.

I know the history of cultural looting that white people in America have with Black Arts.

I know that my rapping is part of that terrible tradition, regardless of whatever “good place” my heart is in.

But what I also know is that for decades, the thing I loved most in this world was writing the next rap.

I know my love for the art of Hip Hop is genuine, just as much as I know that I probably can never fully prove that to anyone.

I’m ok with that. I’m not trying to prove myself to anyone.

Anyone except myself.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I never believed in Essentialism.

Identifying as a white rapper precluded, and was in direct opposition to, a belief system that,

as George Lakoff put it, “make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing”

But understanding that you have limitations – and that those limitations are, in part, based on people’s perception of you, which are, in part, based on how you look – is one of the greatest strengths a person can have.

Anyone who looked at me for two seconds would say I’m not a rapper, and trying to disprove them was part of my motivation for years.

And guess what? I learned how to rap. I am good at rapping.

There’s a lot of good rappers you’ve never heard of.

What I learned from Hip Hop is probably something most people learn at a young age: lean into the things you already are, and are already good at.

As you might have noticed, I enjoyed the writing part of hip hop the most.

I enjoyed the physicality of rapping in my room and the confidence that mastering a skill imbued.

I didn’t enjoy almost everything else about rapping: doing it in public, navigating the imperceptible paths to power, telling people I rapped and then dealing with their responses ranging from “rap for me right now” to “ok, sure”, but I continued because I thought those burdens were just part of paying my dues.

Some dues don’t need to be paid.

While overcoming my anxiety enough to perform on-stage probably had the desired effect of boosting my otherwise non-existent confidence, writing in my room was the thing I loved most.

It took not-making it as a rapper, and life experiences that culminated by 30, to understand that this thing I’m doing right now, writing, is the thing I love, and am inherently better suited to do, than anything else, no matter how much I might want, or think I need, the validation that comes with success in Hip Hop.

The Jordy Skywalker Project is my love letter to the Hip Hop I grew up – and fell in love – with (which I shared pieces of via music videos in this piece), and my most successful attempt at putting my full self on record.

It comes out this month.