Deeper Than Rap
For the rest of the month, I’ll be engaging with the pronounced portrayal of whiteness in a handful of novels that have come out in the last year or so. Today, we’re talking about Vagablonde by Anna Dorn, a novel I really enjoyed reading—so much so, it didn’t even bother me that it featured a woman music journalist who gets romantic with a subject!—it also made me super introspective and I address a lot of that, more so than the novel, so I wanna note here that I liked and recommend it. Next week: an interview with Sarah Elaine Smith, the author of Marilou is Everywhere and possessor of one of my favorite writer brains.
Vagablonde by Anna Dorn is about a state-employed appellate lawyer named Prue whose dream is to become a famous rapper. She is a white woman.
At the beginning of the novel, Prue goes off her meds unsupervised and develops a small dependency on uppers as she gets deeper into the fold of The Kingdom, a hazily hip collective who she starts making music with. Dorn is impeccable at writing the looped thinking that forces a lot of creative, depressed people to abuse substances and make bad choices. I say “bad choices” not to be reductive but because they can be so varied, it’s hard not to name it so simply. (One of the choices Prue makes is so nerve-racking, so brilliant of Dorn, and involves the commingling of her day job and creative practice in an extremely foolish and fatal way.)
Prue loves Lana Del Rey. One of the book’s epigraphs is a quote from Little Edie Beale. In the acknowledgements, Dorn refers to the Mary-Kate Olsen and Sonja Morgan (yes, that kind of Morgan) as some of her muses. Vagablonde is such a deft portrayal of that kind delusional tragicness found in white women who limply engage with the fragile power bestowed upon them; who have become destructive and downtrodden because their proximity to power really registers them more like powerless props. It’s the kind of thing Lana claims she’s not performing to be. The POV is almost uncomfortably self-aware, it’s self-conscious in a delicious, page-turnery way. I read it like I watch Real Housewives but also felt myself reflected back to me in much of Prue’s music taste.
Then I got uncomfortably self-aware and self-conscious.
One question has endured after my reading. Prue refers to a nebula of white women at an Afro-Caribbean dance class she takes as a bunch of Rachel Dolezals but does not classify the Kingdom, with nary a Black person in sight, as a Dolezaly endeavor. Was this an intentional choice or are we just truly post-Post Malone at this point?
The Dolezal of it all is on my mind because of Jessica Krug, the George Washington University associate professor who recently resigned because she is white but has spent her entire academic career claiming to be Black. I won’t get into the details here—she published a self-revealing screed on Medium last week, reportedly to get ahead of being exposed, and you can learn all about it there—but something she wrote stuck with me, though. She called herself worse than a culture vulture. She wrote, “I am a culture leech.”
On a scale of, thoughtful cultural appreciator to culture leech, where do I fall?
Prue’s music taste almost entirely reflects what has long been my beat. Nearly every single artist she referenced, if not all, I have written about. Some of the artists, all Black, are people I covered early. I premiered early Kelela tracks, blogged about Migos before Drake remixed “Versace” and about SZA before she was signed by Kendrick. When I was offered the assignment of writing the Best New Music review of Ctrl., my first BNM ever, I felt like I was having a full-circle career moment.
Six months later I got an email from someone saying they were doing a research project on music reviewer demographics and was looking for confirmation that I am indeed a white person. I deleted it. I didn’t want to deal.
In 2013, the rapper Wale called the office where I worked to yell at the music staff for not including his album The Gifted on our Best Albums of the Year list. “You mean to tell me Juicy J album better than mine?” he screamed on the phone. He didn’t know he was being recorded. It’s not illegal to do that in New York state. He told us he was gonna come to the office and fuck us all up. There was a long debate about whether or not to post the audio. After Wale refused a chance to come in peace to the office and have a frank discussion, on-camera, about the incident, we did. It made national news.
A week later, me and a handful of my coworkers plus a few members of editorial upper brass were drinking sparkling rosé and eating truffle pasta with Wale’s manager at a restaurant in Midtown. We were told it was going to be a peaceful dinner. It wasn’t.
I have two significant memories from it.
The first was one of the editors offered to do a digital cover with Wale, suggested that for the photos he’s should be dressed up as a cop. (Yes, this is true.)
The other was Wale’s manager’s confidence that white people had no business ever writing about rap music because there is a nuance that we can never grasp. She cited her Art History degrees as an example of how one actually engages with art outside of their culture of origin, that she had to learn French and German so that she could understand the art she was studying in its original context. I agreed with her but believed my regular watching of Rap City and obsessive listening to Angie Martinez every single day of my adolescent life, recording her interviews and playing them back over and over again so I could learn how to do what she does, was tantamount to the work she had done in the academy.
I’m not embarrassed to admit that even though now I understand the difference between a Black woman receiving a Euro-centric arts education because the academy is white af and a white woman observing pop culture and acting as a gatekeeper.
The following year, I reviewed The Album About Nothing for Pitchfork and got a lot of praise from some of my peers for savaging Wale even though I thought and still think it’s a measured and fair review. Wale’s fanbase gave me the what-for on Twitter and in other places of my life. Wale himself tweeted that he didn’t care about the review. “They hate me,” he said. I thought it was flippant and wrong but it comes from a place of truth. It’s why he said the thing about Juicy J who, despite being an Oscar winner, makes frivolous druggy party music while Wale excels at introspective angsty pop.
After the audio broke, Wale told Hot 97 it was a bunch of Williamsburg hipsters who made the list and that our opinions about rap didn’t matter. The subtext was that the list was probably mired in subconscious racism. Even though the editor Wale spoke to on the phone was a brown guy who grew up in the Bronx, the majority of us fit the bill.
I thought that didn’t matter then. I came from rap magazines. I thought the only thing that mattered in the equation was me, not what the specter of me and the other writers like me meant in terms of taking up all the space. I only want to occupy the space that is equitable for me to take.
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