Whitey blues

Everlast's house of pain

Frequencies by Josh Kun

The 10th anniversary of N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton last year didn't just mark the anniversary of the first hip-hop album to turn bitches, money, cop blasting, and dopeman economics into both a street-knowledge ethos and a blueprint for nigga-industry commodification. It also marked the anniversary of the birth of the white hip-hopper, or at least the first hip-hop album to transform white hip-hop fans into white hip-hop heads. Straight Outta Compton was the first real hip-hop album that white boys knew by heart -- I still remember being completely disoriented by a room full of baseball hats and flannel shirts lip-synching along to "Gangsta Gangsta" at a fraternity party when I was in college.

Nineteen-ninety-eight was a pretty good year for white hip-hoppers: with Jay-Z and Puffy-style hip-pop confusing the Billboard charts, the Beasties body-moved their way closer to honorary-Negro status, stringy Kid Rock became an MTV fixture, suburban fantasies came true when Korn and Cube emerged as hip-hop's Gibson and Glover, and white critic Charles Aaron self-consciously documented the whole thing in Spin while posing in front of a KRS-One mural. Oh yeah, and Everlast released Whitey Ford Sings the Blues (Tommy Boy).

When Eric "Everlast" Schrody first stepped into the hip-hop ring as an Ice T disciple, back in 1990, he was white. When that didn't work, he went Irish, as the shamrocked frontman of the DJ Muggs-endorsed rap trio House of Pain, which meant acting Soul Assassins-hard in Celtics jerseys and mixing gun talk with leprechauns and shillelaghs. Then Everlast did what any insecure white rapper hungry for realness would do -- he sent a carry-on bag packed with a shotgun through an airport security machine. It made MTV news.

On the radar * "The Leif Garrett Story" on VH1's Behind the Music. * Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Samuel Morse receiving their long-overdue electro props from Erik Davis in his "Recording Angels" article in the January issue of the Wire. * Mexican balladeer José José getting sampled, covered, and butchered by a Mex-rock and hip-hop brigade on José José: Un Tributo (BMG). * Jimmy Scott doing Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U" in exquisite slow motion on Holding Back the Years (Artists Only!).

After House of Pain's demise (apparently, Irishness didn't quite cut it as corporate multiculturalism), Everlast had a heart attack. Whitey Ford Sings the Blues is the 12th step of his spiritual rehab. He is, incidentally, white again -- "the white boy is back" as the colored girls sing on the album's opening cut -- but this time he's Whitey Ford (no apparent reference to the legendary Yankees pitcher), a cowboy-hat-wearing, six-string-picking blues b-boy who's seen the light about the evils of paper chasing and found God.

As a genre, the blues has been a more hospitable home than hip-hop for white boys because of its universalist logic. Anyone who has been down and out has the right to sing it. Heart attack in hand, Everlast chimes in with all he's got. "Catch me singing the blues," he raps, "strumming and picking like I was B.B. King" ("Get Down"). Everlast doesn't want to be B.B., though, he wants to be a junkyard redneck with a junkyard dog, or, as he puts it in "Praise the Lord," "this freckled face man with the farmer's tan." Whitey saves his biggest wanna-be crush for white bluesville's most respected mayor, Dr. John. On the New Orleans piano-and-horn breakbeat gris-gris of "7 Years," he wishes his "sugar" would come home.

Old marketing ethnicities are hard to shake, though. When apologizing to a woman, Whitey says he "can't house this pain"; and all of Whitey's songs are still credited to "Irish intellect music." Still, Whitey Ford is not the "dope Celtic rock album" that Prince Paul thinks it'll be when he leaves a message on Everlast's answering machine. It's a clever negotiation of hip-hop whiteness: beats, rhymes, and slide guitar rendered from behind the mask of the blues.

Unlike Warren Beatty in Bulworth, the new Everlast wants us to believe he's done trying to be somebody else's nigga (even though on a couple tracks he criticizes other rappers for being "fake," a complex for a whole other discussion). At least until his next album, he's just a down-on-his-luck white boy in baggy shorts waiting for his train to come and his mojo to rise, with a guitar case in one hand and a boom box in the other.

Coming next week, columnist Alex Pappademas's "Rapture." First up, a look at turntable jazz deejays.