His is the legacy of cultural appropriation and white privilege-made doubly offensive by the fact that he was so dismissive and contemptuous of the black people from whom he’d stolen rock ‘n’ roll.īut-what if none of that was actually true? His notorious quote (“The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes”), solidified his villainy amongst black people. That line also hit so hard because Elvis Presley’s racism has long been a part of his image and reputation in the black community. You will be forced to reckon with that voice. On a certain level, the line was symbolic of hip-hop’s intentional dismantling of America’s white iconography this was a new generation that wasn’t going to be beholden to your heroes or your standards.
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Public Enemy’s high-profile smackdown of white America’s “ King of Rock ‘N’ Roll” resonated and reverberated throughout hip-hop nation in a way that even overshadowed the Flavor Flav lyrical gut-punch of John Wayne that completed the infamous couplet. It’s one of the most well-known and significant lines in hip-hop history.
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See straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain…” “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me. In that, rock’s history with race is sometimes naïve, sometimes willfully ignorant, and sometimes undeniably hypocritical. In the years between, rock ‘n’ roll matured into “rock” and the counterculture embraced anti-establishment ideas like integration and women’s rights-without ever really investing in tearing down white supremacy in any real, measurable way.
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Music that at one point in the 1950s seemed to herald the deterioration of racial boundaries, gender norms and cultural segregation had, by the 1970s, become re-defined as a white-dominated, male-dominated multi-million dollar industry. It’s a genre that transformed American culture in a way that re-shaped racial dynamics, but it also came to embody them.