Where have all the white rappers gone?

LPCs with Intel inside are built for every moment. With long-lasting battery life and built-in intelligence, you can stay focused on what matters most. They'll technologies, built for you, del.com slash delPCs. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

And I'm producer, Yana Cruz. What have you brought me today? All right, Charlie, you remember Jack Harlow, right? He's the Kentucky rapper behind such hits as First Class.

Yup. It was the Fergie interpolation that I never needed. Sorry. More recently, he had the track, Love and On Me.

I like that one more. It's got the sample of Cadillac Dales, whatever, bass, soliqui. Yeah, both of those were commercially successful singles. And Jack Harlow has been a pretty notable figure in the world of pop rap over the past few years.

And today I bring him up because he is back with a new record. It's called Monica, came out this past week. And it is striking up conversation because of the way that it sounds. Here's the song, Trade Places.

I haven't looked at this yet. And so initial reaction, very 90s neo soul, nodding to D'Angelo, much more R&B, less hip-hop. Yeah, this is the first track on the album. It's the first song you hear.

And in a complete pivot, Monica is not a rap record at all. As you can hear, it's actually a neo soul, an R&B inspired record. And the 180 came as a surprise to me because I know Harlow to be strictly a rapper, specifically one that falls in a long lineage of white mainstream rappers. You know, from someone like Mac Miller going all the way back to the Beastie Boys in the 80s.

And instead of keeping with the vibes of rap as he's done in the past, he's kind of doubled down on this pivot, falling into sounds and textures that in his words, I'm quoting him here, have made him. I got black or music. Yeah. Get blacker.

That was on the New York Times pop cast. Well, he said it out loud. Yeah, I think, you know, this is an extremely out of pocket thing to say. And even more than that, it is connected to the larger culture of white artists, badly co-opting black music.

I mean, as we established with his former hits, like he seems to be someone who has built his sonic identity on other people's art and primarily black art. So needless to say, people have not been reacting kindly to Jack or his record Monica. And you know, his response there did give me thinking about Harlow in the context of race, but specifically in regards to the pantheon of his fellow white rappers and doing a survey of the field, you know, looking at the landscape of rap in 2026, there is a question that I've been mulling over the past few years and that's where have all the white rappers gone? As rap has receded in its commercial success, it seems like the white rappers have moved towards genres that are more commercially popping off like country, emo, rock, other places.

Most of not all of the other big ticket white rappers from specifically the past 10 to 15 years have fully jumped ship from rap. I mean, you mentioned country, I think of post Malone's full send into country music and twang, you know, he put out the record F1 trillion, which is all country songs, even as a song with Hank Williams, Jr. called finer things. Some twang with some Yodel.

White rappers consistently as evidenced through post Malone and Jack Harlow have had radical image and sound shifts. The thing about the pivots prior to Jack is that they are also often commercially lucrative. Both of them has been received well. He's headlining stagecoach.

Jack Harlow's image shift is not set up in the same way. I saw something that this album is projected to debut outside of the top 20 on Billboard. And so there's two things I want to look at. Overall, what is happening on this album, Monica, and how does it compare to his white rapper peers who have also made pivots outside of rap?

Oh boy. But here we go. What is happening on Monica? Obviously, Jack's general disposition towards race is kind of a huge factor in the way this record is being received.

People that would have listened to it are now off put by his now highly publicized comments that he got blacker. And I think for his existing fan base, the pivot is not connecting with what they know Jack Harlow to be. And so I think for the sake of understanding, it's important to identify what the Jack Harlow formula previously was. There's a lot of aspects to his career that are predicated on personality.

He's been able to market himself well. And I think he's delivered commercially successful hits and got massive streaming and radio play. One song of his that I feel like has all of the reasons why he's successful is a track from his debut studio record called Tyler Harlow. Can't touch me.

I got instincts locked in the house, but I'm clapping things. I brought a gang to the party with me by white boys, but they not in sync. And for which I think fuck everything that you say about me. My dogs like a play man, and it's okay.

But one thing I'm doing is play about me. My homeboy Tyler can play something. Kind of a slower trap inspired track. The flute sounds remind me of like future's mask off.

My love. Part. Part. Part.

Part. Part. Part. Part.

Part. Part. He's also realizing playing in the post Malone tradition. That's not the right word.

He's using the same play book as I'm looking for. Play book specifically because Tyler Harlow is a basketball player, one of post Malone's first records, white Iverson, also a non-to basketball player. What are you hearing? What's the Jack Harlow thing for you in this song?

Well, I think he has a casual flow. It doesn't really feel labor the way that he's delivering the lyrics. I agree that the beat reminds me of mask off by future. I think Jack tends to have an ear for beats that are interesting.

I think there's personality in his lyrics and the way that he delivers things. He's friends with Tyler Harlow, but he also mentions that his friends like to play his dogs, as he says, like to play Madden and 2K. He brings up Ymon Shumford, who's another basketball player. His interests are on his sleeve.

And I do think that goes back to his personality element where people connect with him as a person. Yeah. I mean, you say that it's very personality driven. You're saying, hey, I'm just a guy.

I like to play video games with my friends. I mean, frankly, I think Jack kind of looks like the kind of guy who like, by the guy in the middle school with him, he's got a sort of shaggy, uncapped hair. But I feel like Jack Harlow came up at the exact same time that the slang word Riz came about. And I think that that's what he has in space.

And I think that's what he's giving over and over. He has charisma that is captivating. I also think that a fundamental element of this song that kind of extends to the larger Jack Harlow catalog, he kind of centers his whiteness in a very tongue-in-cheek way. His race and his upbringing is a core element of his persona.

He even throws us lines in Tyler Harlow that are like corny self-aware white guy jokes. Like when he says, brought a gang to the party with me, five white boys, but they're not in sync. I brought a gang to the party with me. Five white boys, I think I can sing.

What does that even mean? What's wrong with the sync? I would love to be friends with in sync. Would I be so lucky if that was my crew?

It's a double entendre. Like the guys are not synced up. I don't know. Yeah, they're messy.

These are not, yeah, these are like average dudes. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, he's self-aware. He tends to be a little self-deprecating.

I think ultimately what I gleaned from a track like Tyler Harlow is a sense of humor and a effort delivering a kind of affability that feels sincere. He's also like not afraid to be silly. And I think that's really important for a rapper, particularly a white rapper. But even in this track, the opening line is kind of racially strange.

The ones that hate me the most look just like me. You tell me what that means. I think he's saying I have a lot of black friends, which is a really awkward... No.

It's a strange kind of posturing. It's like the ones that have the biggest problem with Jack Harlow, he is implying, are white guys. And he's like, I'm cool with black people. If you're looking for a high five and you know, okay, you don't give it to yourself.

Yeah. And it kind of functions maybe as like a crystal ball into the racial politics that end up being his downfall in the future. Right? Like maybe there's a line to trace between the ones that hate me the most look just like me.

And with this new record, I quote unquote, got blacker. Okay. So where do we go from here? So, Tyler Harlow is off of his debut album.

And generally, Jack Harlow's larger body of work has failed to excite critically. I once wrote a piece that described his sophomore record, come home to kids, miss you as quote, devoid of any discernible character, mediocre raps and instrumentals that could have been found by searching Drake type beats on YouTube. So you're not holding any punches. Yeah.

Well, the thing is, is that like, I feel like I understand the Jack Harlow character. And when he doesn't play to the things that make him worth my time, it doesn't land. He has trouble playing to his strengths. Perhaps that he's pursuing this kind of self-serious image, you know?

So he's already batting low, puts out another record called Jackman in 2023. This is actual name, Jack is short for Jackman. And he's dropped a few singles since then, including the track Just Us featuring Doja Cat. I wish she was just us in his bitch, but they can't trust us in his bitch.

Cause I'm trying to bust nuts in his hand. Let's keep it. When I hurt her in his bitch, I told her she's so pretty. And she just blessed in his bitch.

He feels like he's putting on a lot of masks. Interesting. You think he's like cosplaying as Riz God? Yeah.

Totally. Clearly in 2026, you know, Harlow finds himself in a weird musical space trying to figure out what works. A lot of his stuff isn't really landing, which leads us back to Monica. I was kissing someone and we're trying to get the singers.

I want you to pay some. Radical transformation, right? We've left behind all of the electronics-e-wen-strums. We have a very swung, slow beat.

The bass is live and feels very akin to the sort of like, you know, playing off of D'Angelo's record. When I think of D'Angelo, I go first to Voodoo. It has that loose timing that, you know, Questlove was bringing to that record. I feel like that's what he's so clearly copying from and having lost D'Angelo so recently, that's a really bold kind of sound to move towards.

Yeah. And I also think that in that Jack-song trade places, there really is no sense of humor or discernible personality coming from Jack. It's kind of letting like the music talk for him. But when the music is not feeling authentic, it falls flat.

And I think by abandoning personality and switching to like this neo-soul aesthetic, I get the vibe that Jack Harlow wants to like have this pseudo-intellectual air to his project. I find that he is disposing of everything that previously made Jack Harlow. Yeah. If you extricate your own personality from your music and you make a shift into someone else's music, all you have is the mask that you're wearing.

And you know, I think that the word authentic is such a complicated word. But if there's something true to himself, if it's that video game Shaggy Hair Kid with the Addison friends, none of that is present, at least on this song that you played. It sounds like he's just play acting, someone else's sound in genre. I want to listen to one of the songs on Monica Lonesome and dissect the sound a little bit more.

I want to see you sing. Sparse instrumental happening here, we're operating with just a guitar based drum kit. A piano comes in every now and again to like hit or note or two. But it feels very intimate musically.

You can kind of hear everything that's happening. It would make sense to me if they're all recording with us in the same room, each trying to flag sophistication in the way that this sounds. It's a vibe that is like perhaps fit for like a coffee shop or a bookstore or like an intimate open mic on your college campus. Like that kind of thing is what I hear in this track.

This is a different good bookstore chic. It feels intentional to place this rebrand in those spaces because maybe he's trying to signal an artistic pretension that previously, you know, when you listen to Tyler Hero, when you listen to first class, like isn't there? That's kind of like lowest common denominator. You're going from like class clown to a student.

I think maybe some of the reason why we're hearing the association to the bookstore to the library is that so much of the internet was taken over in the last decade by lo-fi beats to study and show too. And that music is so built upon the beats of Jay Dilla, who's loose timing and soundscape end up being a source of inspiration for so much of the neo soul movement and mis-acquariance we're playing on the D'Angelo records. And so when we hear there's sort of like loose timed beats where the kick and the snare kind of head of the beat and the behind the beat, things that are a little woozy, that's exactly what we're hearing on Monica. And it doesn't sound much different than going to that YouTube playlist where that girl studying with her cat next to her.

So true. I didn't even think of that, but this really is like lo-fi, I guess like lo-fi neo soul beats to study too. Like that's what he is trying to do on these songs. Yeah, if anyone needs to give him credit, maybe it's like, you know, even the Klaus Glauen has to pass their task occasionally.

So maybe he's got to get serious and study for his exams. Is that what's happening here? He said I have to lock in real quick. Yeah.

But I musically, I don't think the album is totally shallow. There's subtle moments where he tries to expand the sonic palette. I think I'm on some, there's a minute where he brings in these muted trumpets that are kind of nice. I mean, again, a sound that we heard all over D'Angelo's voodoo, Roy Hargrooves trumpets on a track like Spanish Joy.

So we are wearing the influence on a sleeve. It's the same sound. For me, the D'Angelo track I came to mind is this cover of Feel Like Make and Love, which has similar trumpets. Oh yeah.

Really subtle in there. Feel like layering with the guitars and the keys. And I think that Roy Hargrooves playing both trumpet and frugal horn as well. And you can hear it's like behind the mix in the song.

Yeah. It's just two on the nose. It's a costume. It's like a Halloween.

And you bring up the word costume. I think part of what is so comical about this whole rollout is like Jack keeps wearing these outfits that look so silly on him. And he's wearing his influences honestly, right? Like he's aping D'Angelo's style, his sound, the way he mixes his records.

He is copying someone like the rapper, Commons outfits. Where he's wearing all of these earth toned turtlenecks and kangal hats and frameless glasses, like that sort of thing. But showcasing your influences like that does not make your sound better. In fact, I feel like it detracts from what you're doing because why would I listen to Monica if I could just listen to Voodoo?

Absolutely. As you said, it really literally is actually on his sleeve, not just figuratively. He's dressing up for the part. And I'm not sure he was invited to the party.

Yeah. And I think another misunderstanding that's happening on Monica is there's a musical sophistication in what someone like D'Angelo's doing that is oversimplified in the Jack Harlow take. There's a swirling cloud of emotion in every D'Angelo track. They're sexy, they're sweaty.

All of that appeal is subtracted from the Jack Harlow sound and even the things he's saying, you know, previously, like he has these songs that are, I wouldn't say sexy, but care is mad at, you know, he flirts in them. I think the flirting is a cornerstone of his personality. There's lines on this album that are so unsexy. It feels like he doesn't really understand what Neo soul is.

It's a sexy genre. This is like the most egregious to me. This light on trade places. Oh my gosh.

You know, they should have just put like samples of baristas, steaming milk because all I can think about is just like, is cappuccinos. This is cafe music. That's ridiculous. I wish I could be the lamp.

What? Right. Cause you know what sexy lampos and handrails I could be a hand rail that you put your hands on. I'm not like a deep germaphobe.

Like you don't touch a hand rail if you don't have to. No, totally. I can't really think of anybody leaning sexily against a lamppost. I feel like it's uncomfortable.

Maybe this is an example of someone who got so famous that they haven't been outside in a couple of years. They're like, what did normal people do? They got handrails? Yeah.

Put my hand on the hand rail. So strange. Odd record. Very odd record.

And part of what I find so maybe thorny about this album is that he incorporated like several black musicians and artists on these songs. Robert Glassber plays piano on the track, All of My Friends. What is that? A nod to?

It sounds familiar. It's like the second track on Led Zeppelin I. Help me out here. That is babe.

I'm going to leave you. Yeah, try that out. I mean, they're both like a minor descending line cliche. I don't know.

That's what I heard. I think it's interesting though, because Led Zeppelin's entire career is based on the black musical tradition of blues. Okay, totally different vibe. But same descending thing.

So that it's literally called a line cliche, which is not going to say uncreative, but what I mean to say is uncreative. No, you could say uncreative. You can make a great song without descending line cliche. There's so many of them.

Cliches are great. Like we could use cliches to like establish a set of expectations and then subvert them. What Jack Harlow is doing is establishing a set of expectations and pretending to live in them. Yeah, he's not really subverting anything.

And maybe using cliche is a way to get listeners to connect positively with music that isn't incredibly inspired. And maybe another way that he's doing that is bringing in these acclaimed black musicians to kind of haul pass it a little bit, you know, like he's able to do this because he has people like Robert Glasser, like jazz musician Corey Henry who's playing Oregon on a couple songs. There's other folks on the record like Mustafa, Raven Lene, Omar Apollo even does background vocals. People probably put their name on this good faith and didn't know entirely who this guy was, but he seems to be showing himself.

Yeah, the image fundamentally is not aligning with what he said, what he has done in the past. And that got me thinking, you know, what clicked for others? Why is Post Malone so successful in switching up his whole vibe and Jack Harlow isn't? So when we come back from break, I'd like to take a look at some of the other big white rappers from the past decade, see other image shifted and highlight the precedent for Jack Harlow's pivot.

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It's interesting to me that Jack Carla was chosen to abandon the genres that he started his career with, but it also doesn't really come as a surprise considering, you know, as we said with someone like Led Zeppelin, there's a precedent in music for white artists coming out to co-op Black sounds, reach massive success doing so. And then in the case of white rappers, pivot. This is the story of pop music throughout history. And in the rap world, there's been white rappers for as long as the genre has been around.

You know, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know everything about the career of vanilla ice or, you know, the- Did he not try to make a new metal record? I got to check this whole one a second. Hard to swallow is the third studio album by American rapper Vanilla Ice, and it is categorized as new metal. Wow.

Which, you know, metal featured rapping, but also like moving from more obviously Black genre towards a more white-coded genre. White rappers have been successful in the past. I think Paul Wall is like a white dude from the south who has been extremely influential in Southern rap. Wow, baby.

It's the biggest town town, something like a pile of power, the candy bank driven out for the old swimming power. You know, I think of also Beastie Boys defining white rapper group. You got to fight! But for the sake of understanding, Jack, I have three examples to kind of show the truncated history of white rapper vibe switches as of late.

Okay. So where do we start? What do we learn? Well, we brought him up before in this conversation.

When he started his career, it was of a similar vibe as Jack Carla, right? We talked about white Iverson, how it kind of parroted Black culture, references basketball. The title, white Iverson is self-aware, you know, kind of winking like I'm the white Allen Iverson, sure. And the music is in this cloud rap space, which came at the right time because he was able to chase the convergence of rap, pop, R&B, all these different sounds.

I'm burning, I'm burning, I'm burning, I'm the song on you. So don't watch out, don't watch out again. That's my shot, that's my shot, that's my shot again. Charlie, imagine you're in high school when that song comes out, generational.

You know, I still, as I did in the 90s, probably would have been in the back corner at the middle school dance. That first record of his, that white Iverson is on, Stoney, was one of the defining records of my high school experience. I heard it played in cars, I heard it on the radio. It was everywhere.

And part of what I like about that record is that there's a fluidity to genre that I think is really special for Post Malone and Country, I think, has always been an underlying part of his work. My favorite song on Stoney is The Track Leave, which sounds different than white Iverson or congratulations or other singles that came off this album. This is like a gothic, stomped-clap music. Yeah, it's like a weird stomped-clap trap hybrid.

Yeah. So what you're saying is that the pivots that Post Malone has made in his career are kind of all invited from the very beginning, even within white Iverson, you hear that sort of goofy, playful nature in some of the lyrics that Post Malone presents. It also is sung in the sort of romantic kind of quality. Yeah.

It's like it's coming to you in a dream. Yeah. It is playing at the intersection of multiple genres. And there's plenty of ways that he certainly was dressing up as a rap star.

I think he has worn different outfits, no doubt, in the way that he has presented himself, but the country was there. And so it's not as much of a hard pivot. Country is ascending while rap has been struggling on the Billboard chart over the last couple years. So he might be chasing commerce.

He might be chasing his interests, but they were plausibly there from the very beginning. And F1 Trillion is the end point of the pivot. It is, like I said, a country album. It spans the breath of country music.

There's even a bluegrass song in there with Billy Strings. The album gave him the incredibly popular number one hit. I had some help with Morgan Wallen. Oh, there's some stomped-clap ha in there.

A record F1 Trillion sounds like the name of a rap album, obviously adapting the Ford F-150, but into sort of like, you know, Braggadocio over the top luxury status of F1 Trillion. But then what we get are fiddle-plang country drums. There's even a song with Dolly Parton, which, to bring Jack Carlo back into the picture, Jack once said that he wants to get Dolly Parton on a record with him to do some quote, hard shit. So I feel like maybe Jack is trying to chase the post Malone of it all.

The difference though is that post always had the image of someone who would be suited for country music. Goes to show how important image is for a successful rebrand. And it doesn't feel like he's cosplaying or wearing a costume, which is, as we've been talking about one of Jack's issues, he seems to be wearing a cultural costume. I hadn't seen post dress up like he was from Austin, Texas, and told us album release.

But it's different wearing a cowboy hat and a Western shirt than it is wearing a kangal, trying to be common. Like, it's a different thing. Very different when you're directly copying a specific person's style, whether that sound or visual, especially when it's recently coded. Another artist I think of that did a radical genre pivot in the past decade is the artist formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly.

He actually changed his name to just MGK. It used to be Machine Gun Kelly. And is that a nod to a song? The song Machine Gun Kelly?

Is that where you got the name? I've never known. There's a song called Machine Gun Kelly. Are you kidding me?

You're not a big old James Taylor fan? Maybe not. No. I know Fire Rain.

That's James Taylor. No, you've got to spin it. I'll tell you about Machine Gun Kelly. You go along the out in the trail.

She gunkale, it was a simple man, but the woman was his heart. OK, so obviously MGK is borrowing the name from the original Machine Gun Kelly, who was a probation-era gangster. But I just really love the idea that in fact he was a major James Taylor head. Well, when MGK was Machine Gun Kelly, his music, which came out in the back half of the 2010s, was trap music.

If you listen to a song like, Loko from his 2018 record, Binge, you hear in your face vocals and a bass heavy beat. It felt provocative for the sake of being provocative. And it's abrasive music. It's not very easy to listen to in any record.

No, it's not an easy listen. That was 2018 when this song came out. 2020 hits in MGK Land and things switch up. He catches the wave of the pop punk revival at the right time and releases the album tickets to my downfall, which was one of the four minute records for the revival of pop punk music at the beginning of this decade.

Here's the track, My X's Best Friend. Ultimately, a pop song. Yeah. Is that one of the tracks that he did with Travis Barker?

Yeah. From a blink, one of the, OK, so that's kind of an interesting transition. We're like, you know, Travis Barker, who is one of those great pop punk drummers, finds this late career pivot into making trap beats, does work with Lil Wayne and XX Centesion, and also, of course, MGK. And so it's kind of like Travis Barker's pivot producer between hip hop and pop punk and MGK rise that wave.

Yeah. And it's somehow both pop punk, but also trap, like there's trap high hats in there. Yeah. Yeah.

But it aligns itself more with something like five seconds of summer. You know what I mean? This like radio friendly boy band rock coated vibe that is so different than what he was doing previously prior to the pandemic. And I think the pandemic is a reason why this is successful.

You know, there's kind of an angst brewing among Gen Z. And he met the moment where it was at. And MGK carved out a specific niche in shepherding this revival. There wasn't much new music in this ballpark when tickets to my downfall came out.

So that kind of set him apart from the rest of the pack. Jack Carlow, by comparison, loves the black music he's taking from, sure. But there's nothing to set it apart from others, particularly black artists, making better, more inspired versions of the same music. Can I just use this as an opportunity to once again on the show play this on cliche by MGK featuring my least favorite lyric of the decade.

Nope. You can't create nostalgia. Nope. Exactly, right?

It's like you can't. nostalgia is something that we have. It's a feeling for something we've inspired you from the past. You can't create nostalgia in the moment.

That line killed me. It's the number one stream song on Spotify right now, which I'm now seeing, is just three songs up from the song Lonely Road with Jelly Roll, who's the third artist that I know you wanted to speak about. Yeah, so similar to MGK and Post Malone. Jelly Roll, I feel like, has been everywhere the past few years.

Even he used to be a white rapper. I feel like people don't talk about that enough. He has an early series of mixtapes called Gambling on a White Boy, which I think is a great title. It makes me laugh.

Here's a track from Gambling on a White Boy 4 called F What They Talk About. What? Is this like 2000s Southern hip hop? Yeah, exactly.

It's aligned with what was the sound of Southern hip hop at the time. The shift happens after Jelly Roll spends time in prison, kind of gets his life together, as he said publicly over and over again. This narrative of Jelly Roll has been repeated ad nauseam. This decade, he's adopted the aesthetics of country music, like Post Malone, one of his first big singles being the track, Need a Favor.

Yeah, his music and personality goes straight to televangelist preacher with extra 20. Exactly. I say country, but I see more as a hybrid between contemporary Christian music and outlaw country. It exists in the middle of those two worlds.

It's different than Post Malone's bro country. You could see Post Malone drinking out of red solo cups at Jason Haldine's bar in Nashville with Florida, Georgia Line or whatever. But Jelly Roll, there's a sense of humility in his work. If I had religion, oddly enough, Need a Favor reminds me of a song from another White rapper, Bubba Sparks' Deliverance.

No. Deliverance is a Timbaland project, as you can hear. I was so wondering if it was okay. I actually don't know that track.

I'm sure I've heard it in the background. It's just not my music. But I was like, this sounds so similar to like, Justified or what is going on. Yeah, obviously it's a Timbaland beat.

It's a Timbaland track. Bubba Sparks has a few really big hits. I think of his track Ugly, which I think Timbaland Fash is a companion piece to get your free gone because it beat transitions in the back half of that track. The connection that I see between Bubba Sparks and Jelly Roll is that they both kind of infuse this backwood country sensibility into hip hop.

But Jelly Roll's music often skews more Christian, more directly referencing the Bible and God and scripture and all of that. But I think Jelly Roll's pivot is successful because it's motivated by real life growth and change. Like his narrative is the project. I don't listen to Jelly Roll.

I know nearly everything about his life from the past 20 years because it's just repeated over and over again in a way to maybe give the music more legitimacy. There seems to be plausible motivations for all three artists that you have pointed out. But all three artists have moved from a historically, traditionally more black genre to historically, traditionally more white genre and have been able to move their audiences with them, oftentimes growing their audience as well. So when we think about this in context with Jack Harlow, Jack Harlow has instead pivoted into R&B, a genre that was originally labeled as race records as music executives marketed in a way that was intentionally segregated.

And that's the musical lineage that he's stepping into. So earlier, I mentioned my grand question, where have all the white rappers gone? And as we piloted, people have pivoted out of the genre, but not everybody does. You know, think of someone like Paul Wall, who still continues to make southern hip hop music and more successful than any of these people, Eminem.

Yeah, that of course. I don't think there was a defined shift in Eminem's career or his image or his genre over time. And maybe that's why he's so successful. What do you mean, no shift of identity?

He went from being slim shady to Marshall Mathers to Eminem. There are many versions. He's got all these characters that exist, though, to your point, all within the world of rap. You make a great point.

Maybe that's why he's successful. He's able to switch it up while staying kind of within his lane. And I used to have a really big Eminem phase when I was in like, you know, six or eight or whatever. So I was very familiar with his catalog.

And something that I appreciate about his work is that he's always able to balance the serious with the silly. Maybe that's why people still connect with him because he's not one note. He contains multitudes. You know, I think of how songs like cleaning out my closet, this really dark confessional track is on the same album as without me.

This bouncy, silly, slim, shady, owed to celebrity. Like the two vibes are in equal standing. He's got the serious, the silly, the mom's getty. It's all there.

He's also one of the most talented rappers of all time. I mean, that's something that also distinguishes him. He's like, he's not playing something. He really is one of the most excellent lyricists.

His flow, his capacity to have expert level rhythmic dexterity with the narrative continuity and creative rhyme schemes. That's one of the things that makes him stand out. Yeah, I guess none of these other people really have the skills to back up a continued career in this field. Hey, you said it.

The idea of being a quote unquote white rapper is ultimately limiting. You know, if you're not willing to push the envelope, develop your talent, try new sounds, you're going to be stuck in a rut forever and feel like you need to switch. Or your career is going to be nonexistent a few years after you come out. Look at Mackelmore.

You mean Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis won the 2014 Grammy for best rap album over Kendrick Lamar? Yeah, and people don't look back fondly on that win. No, they don't let up. No, because it's not just doing some internal looking.

It's also like, you got your homework. You're like part of a lineage that you have to be contributing back to meaningfully. Don't just sit your toe in. So looking at these examples and Eminem as a figure in rap, I think there's two things that Jack Arlo needs to do if he wants his next album to really be the one to pop off.

He needs to hone up his technical skills, get really, really good at rhyming. And he needs to wait until the waters of country, the proof is in the pudding, people. I mean, I won't be surprised by that, but I'll say that I'm not holding my breath. Better get to those banjo lessons, Jack Arlo and fast.

So something I was thinking about when making this episode is the fact that there are still white rappers in the world. I think of young Lean who started in Cloudrap and has pivoted into this rock electronic, ottor space that he finds himself in. NetSpend, who I spoke about on my Rolling Loud recap episode a while back, just released his debut album, Early Life Crisis, and it peaked at 39 on the Billboard 200. So there's still room for white rappers.

Where do they go from here though? That's a big question. Isn't it? Nashville has room for everybody.

So it's room for you in country music. Switched on pop is produced by Reanna Cruz, edited by Lesus Soap, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, video by Nick Rips, music is by Zach Tenerio and Jossi Adams of Arc Iris. Remember for Fox Media podcast, network and production of Vulture, which is part of New York, mag, and subscribe at micha.com slash pod. You can find more stuff with Switched on pop on our website at Switched on pop, all the various merch, things like that, our newsletter.

It's all there. We'll be back again next week, with another episode on Tuesday and until then, thanks for listening.