Royce da 5'9" dropped his new album The Allegory on Friday, and a track featuring his close friend Eminem is turning heads. Titled "Perspective - Skit," the track sees Em talking over a melancholy beat about how rap has brought people together, while he also discusses how much representation matters in media for kids.
"But you've got people of all races, like, coming together and helping shape this from the ground up," he starts the track. "So now you got little white kids growin' up with black idols. And you got black kids growin' up with white idols. And you got—it's just this whole mixing pot. Nothing has brought more races and more people from all different walks of life together than hip-hop. No music has done that, I don't think anything has done that as much as hip-hop has."
From there he goes on to say that he understands "the frustration" that "damn never every form of music, period, was created by black people." He mentions Chuck Barry and Rosetta Tharpe, two of the biggest rock 'n' roll innovators of all-time, and how Elvis Presley was ultimately dubbed the king of rock despite taking heavy influence from both.
"So now, he sells the most records and people are calling him the king of rock n' roll right?" he continues. "But, on the flip side of the coin, if I'm a black kid, growing up in say the '60s, '70s, '80s, whatever, right? And I'm looking on TV and nobody looks like me and it's very stereotypical and I'm looking at fuckin'—I'm looking at toys and everything is white, the fucking action figures are all white. The fucking superheroes are all white. Like maybe there's one or two black superheroes mixed in there with mostly white. I don't how I'd grow up and not have a chip on my shoulder."
Closing out the song, which is track 15 on the 22-song record, he remarks that no one gets to choose their parents, and "we don't get to choose what color we're born." He says that what ultimately matters, is that it's what you do with your identity, be it nationality or race, and you "make a difference."
Listen to the track above.
