Why White Kids Like Ice Cube

***Disclaimer*** Although I've become a sort of resident expert on all things White, I might know about as much about mainstream White culture as I do about Latino culture (little to none, to my dismay) or Black culture.  I've spent most of my life on the outside looking in, and although most of my peers growing up were White, the ones I gravitated to were hardly part of the mainstream.  ***End of Disclaimer***

The question came from my colleague, fellow (although he's been at it a lot longer than I) blogger, and mind I admire, Harold Clemens: "Why do White kids like Ice Cube?  Don't they realize that he's talking about them?"

And the answer is: well, first of all, anybody who is listening to Ice Cube assumes that he's talking about the other White people.  Certainly, not me.  At least that's what we told ourselves.  I hung out with the freaks and punks at the University of Scranton (btw - Scranton, PA has to be the lamest city in the world).  My friends into hardcore punk were also into hardcore rap.  We also talked about the impending race war (we weren't making this stuff up, there was an article I read about that time - 1994/5 - in the San Francisco Bee about the far-right neo-Nazis and their plans for the race war) and how we knew which side we would be on and it wasn't the lighter shade.  Listening to Ice Cube was an act of solidarity.  Cube scratched the same itch that, say, Snapcase, or Sick of it All, did.  We were pissed with American society and here were musicians (that term might be contested by some, but fuck you and your bourgeois standards) that found a way to express the anger we had against injustice.

Anyways, there were also plenty of wealthy White kids that were clearly not rebelling against the larger system, but listened to Cube nonetheless.  I think this was because of a personal aggravation with the "lack of freedom" in American society.  That is, they found Fuck tha Police to be an anthem, because they felt the police took away their rights.  Kind of like the number of college student riots across the country in the late 90s because the bars shut down at 3am, or whatever.  This wasn't revolutionary, this was reactionary bullshit.  White kids listening to Cube because he said fuck the system, but only taking him seriously as far as their own individual preferences and prerogatives were concerned.  Kind of like my high school friend who sang PE's 911 is a Joke, and complained about the po-po showing up 10 minutes after they were called in Newton, fucking, MA - at one point the city with the lowest crime rate in all of America.  I'm pretty sure he has never done a damn thing about the larger problems of racism in America, but he sure felt Public Enemy spoke to him and he listened to their music.

Anyway, the point, I suppose, is that there might be a variety of reasons why White kids listen to Ice Cube, or rap, or whatever, some of them more noble than others.  There are those White kids, like, say Eminem, who relate because, for the most part, it tells their story.  There are those who relate because they recognize the truth of what is being said, and want to bear witness to that truth.  And there are those who relate because it meets their own selfish and immediate needs.