Anyone who's heard Yeezus—or really, any Kanye West record—knows Kanye is prone to some outlandish rhymes. So The Daily Beast had the bright idea to head over The High Line in NYC and get some people to recite some of Kanye's more outre lines from the album like, "Black dick all in your spouse again/She got more niggas off than Cochran."
Problem is, The High Line is filled with tourists. So basically what we have here is the Daily Beast getting people with "funny accents" to recite dirty words.—including, often, the word "nigga." (To be fair, there is one girl in the video who appears to be black).
Not sure if Europeans fully understand the context of this word in America, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But The Daily Beast ought to know better. We noticed that they didn't ask anyone to recite the line, "My grandmother was raised in an era when/Clean water was only served to the fairer skin."
Daily Beast probably just thought, "Rap music. LOLz. Amirite?" Either that or some variation of, "Here's a good opportunity to pretend to show how ridiculous rap music is, but really, it's just a clever way of finding an instance where it's technically okay for a white person to say 'nigga'." You know, like when Mad Men had John Slattery don black face because it's a show set in the '60s so it's okay to broadcast blackface in "post-racial" America.
But you know what, setting aside the racial fucked-up-ness. I'm glad this video was made. If anything, it just makes me appreciate how difficult it is to rap and rap well. Rapping often just sounds like a person talking to you, but it's not. It's a person rapping to you, rhythmically and on beat. It looks easy the same way Kobe makes reverse layups look easy. If you really think that rapping isn't a skill and worthy of ridicule, then try rapping Kanye's verse on "Clique" at a karaoke bar sometime.
[via The Daily Beast]
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