Asher Roth was a controversial figure in hip-hop even before the April release of his debut album, “Asleep in the Bread Aisle,” and the ascendance of its hit single, “I Love College,” a loping ode to the Bacchanalian joys of an undergraduate existence unencumbered by actual schoolwork.
The controversy had less to do with his music than the color of his skin: Roth is white.
That this fact should define him, a decade after Eminem released his jaw-dropping “Slim Shady” LP, and more than two decades after the Beastie Boys’ “Licensed To Ill” became rap’s first No. 1 album, is a fairly dispiriting gauge of how far hip-hop hasn’t come in the past 30 years.
Roth, who turns 24 this month, was born and raised in Morrisville, Pa., a quaint Philadelphia suburb. He didn’t endure a hardscrabble upbringing — his father was a consultant, his mom an aerobics instructor — and was a teenager before he bought his first rap album, Jay-Z’s “In My Lifetime, Vol. 2.”
In high school, Roth swapped verses with friends and managed to sell 250 copies of a self-made cassette. When he went to college at nearby West Chester University, he posted his tunes on MySpace.
Scooter Braun, an Atlanta-based rap promoter, heard them and persuaded Roth to move to Atlanta to devote himself full time to rap. Roth soon signed with SRC/Loud Records and in 2008 released a mixtape, “The Greenhouse Effect,” with DJ Drama and Don Cannon, two vaunted hip-hop tastemakers whose previous mixtapes had featured and boosted the career prospects of, among others, Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy and Jim Jones.
The mixtape built buzz but also backlash. He was derided as a fake, a white minstrel show and, most often, an Eminem clone.
This last accusation was most perplexing. As Roth himself puts it on his debut album’s “As I Em,” “we have the same complexion and similar voice inflection,” but that’s where the similarities end.
Eminem might be white, but he grew up enmeshed in black culture in Detroit. Roth didn’t and — more to the point — doesn’t claim to. The first CD he ever bought was “Crash” by the Dave Matthews Band. We know this because Roth freely offered this credibility-shredding nugget to the now-defunct urban music magazine Vibe.
“Asleep in the Bread Aisle” is filled with rhymes about Roth’s experience as a child of the ’burbs. On the opening cut, “Lark On My Go-Kart,” he references Teddy Ruxpin and Bob Saget, calls himself a “dork” with “hair like a Troll doll” and rhymes about egging houses and smashing pumpkins (pun intended), rather wholesome mischief in a genre that frequently fetishizes drive-bys. “His Dream” is an almost painfully earnest salute to his notably not-absent father. On “Fallin’,” over a sample from alt-folkie Ben Kweller, he admits as a white suburbanite, he couldn’t really relate to that first Jay-Z album he bought.
His flow throughout is casual, conversational and clever; Roth doesn’t seem particularly solicitous of anyone’s approval. He’s not asking for a ghetto pass.
To borrow hip-hop’s most tired formulation, Roth is actually keeping it real. As such, his real antecedent is not Eminem but the Beastie Boys, who despite their rap pioneer bona fides have always rhymed about their own resolutely eclectic interests. An even better, more colorblind comparison is Kanye West, whose collegiate, two-parent, middle-class background has informed the most compelling aspect of his rhymes — the battle between his appetite for the trappings of fame and his recognition of their ultimate meaninglessness.
What do Roth’s tales of suburbia tell us? That despite the manicured lawns and better-performing schools, the totems exalted by suburban layabouts — namely, sex, drugs, video games and Barack Obama — aren’t much different from those of their urban counterparts. While this fact can be gratifying proof of the universality of youth, it’s also an indicator of hip-hop’s reach into the suburbs. According to various studies, somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of people who buy hip-hop albums are white, and that has been the case since at least the mid-’90s. Despite the general perception, hip-hop culture is not black culture anymore, it’s popular culture.
Unfortunately, Roth’s skin color shoehorned him into a pre-existing historical narrative. It’s too pat to say Vanilla Ice ruined rap for white guys, but it’s not totally wrong. Ice’s music wasn’t as bad as it’s remembered, but his concocted back story (he claimed to be from the streets of Miami rather than the Dallas suburbs) and his massive, sudden commercial success (his debut, “To The Extreme,” sold some 11 million copies) cemented an image in the popular imagination that has a long history: White guy appropriates black art and gets rich.
The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Al Jolson and many others have all, fairly and unfairly, felt the sting of this accusation, and nearly every white rapper with dreams of fame and fortune has battled it. (In underground hip-hop, where commercial aspirations generally take a back seat to artistic ones, white MCs such as Cage, El-P and Aesop Rock are respected and common enough to keep their whiteness from being their defining characteristic.)
Put another way, 20 years after Elvis was crowned the King of Rock ’n’ Roll for essentially introducing a black art form to white people, white rockers weren’t having to defend themselves for ripping off black pioneers such as Chuck Berry or Ike Turner. But 23 years after “Licensed to Ill,” Roth is still answering questions about why a white kid from the suburbs would rap.
In the end though, a better question is why, after decades of hip-hop’s cultural dominance throughout the suburbs, many more white kids aren’t doing the same thing?
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