\nthinking about The Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”
and how it’s about the “wigger”, which meant “white nigger” in a jocular tone but not in the earnest sense of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”, like the white-suburban kid who identifies\ufffc with black roughness as processed by the media filter that let anything into white suburbia
Wiggers seem anachronistic now, because black American hip-hop has become a genuinely multiculturally-popular form of music, and the genre has evolved and diversified, admitting much less rough forms of expression. Granted, a lot of that popularity, particularly among western elites, has to do with performative antiracism, but performative antiracism isn\u2019t the same thing as being a wigger in any case.
I mean part of it is as rap broadens to replace rock as the base of American popular music it vocalizes things that are more universally applicable
Like in the gangsta rap 90s it would be like
black rapper: I’m a hard motherfucker, from a world where criminal enterprise is the mainstream and there’s predatory killers preying on THAT
middle-class white rap fan: yeah I’M a\u2014
everyone else: no you aren’t
And now it’s like
black rapper: sometimes I get sad but then I think about boobies
middle-class white rap fan: yeah sometimes I get sad but then I think about boobies
everyone else: fair enough
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