Despite the fact that the vast majority of rap and hip-hop is created by African Americans, the success of this extremely popular type of music is directly linked to the involvement of white people in the industry. As ironic as it is, rap music is fueled by white consumers, and in all reality relies on them to sustain its profitability continue to expand. Where would rappers today be without seventy percent of their record sales, bought by white people? Those who at one point were rebelling against white people (the government, corporate America) through protest rap can give thanks directly to those "oppressors" (white people) in general for their success in the music industry. Furthermore, the cooperation between the beat makers and the rap star producers has allowed big record companies to benefit from this booming section of the recording industry.

Support by those you oppose. This can be seen as the basic summary of white consumption of rap and hip-hop, which really began to skyrocket with the group Public Enemy. An explanation for this great Caucasian support of early rap is rebellion. The buying of rap by white people, specifically tee

"It's funny that I'm a black man but white stations add my music before

An interesting phenomena seen in the hip-hop world is the emergence of some white rappers in the 90's such as Snow and Vanilla Ice. The latter, Vanilla Ice, was impressively successful in selling albums of a traditionally black-ruled type of music. Vanilla claimed to be from the ghetto and tried to identify with typical African-American rappers, growing up in difficult conditions. However, his story has been questioned with evidence that he grew up in a middle class area under all but none of the conditions he claimed. Vanilla Ice is most likely one of the many white "rebellious" fans who took his interest in the music to the next level: making his own rap. He is the product of the constantly increasing white hip-hop audience. Since Vanilla Ice, who was a one-hit-wonder, there haven't been any equally successful white rappers.

This issue of an increasingly white rap audience is becoming more and more of an issue for artists trying to continue the tradition of producing rap targeted for African Americans. This topic of the importance of white audiences was addressed in an interview last year with rapper Coolio, regarding about his new album, "My Soul," that was released in 1997:

Whites affect rap in a few ways: they are becoming a bigger part of rap's audience and the white-run record labels have cooperated to get rap labels under their penumbra. In general, whites influence record sales by buying more individual albums while sharing less. Additionally, they do not exchange bootlegs as much as blacks do. By purchasing more of their own official albums (not bootlegs), whites are relied upon for the profitability of a rap group. This group of consumers has proven to be necessary to the African-American music makers. Besides the consumer-end of the market, whites have given rappers national exposure in places they otherwise would not have been seen (or heard). Early on, successful rappers were under independent, smaller labels like Tommy Boy, Def Jam, and Profile. There were two major problems with these two systems (independent and big name labels): 1-independents couldn't get the national exposure that the big names had, they couldn't get on the shelves of the majority of CD/record stores; 2- the big name labels couldn't get in with the urban scene that was "owned" by the independents. Major labels realized the growing importance of rap and hip-hop in the recording industry yet they didn't have the local knowledge of the culture that these independent labels had. The groups that signed with big name labels didn't fare nearly as well (in sales) as those who signed with the independents. The knowledge and understanding that the independents had gave them the ability to sign specific acts that big labels couldn't touch. The general trend of these artists became signing with independents. Consequently, major labels began buying out the independents while letting them continue to function as they did before. The difference, however, was increased exposure for acts under the smaller labels. Artists under the independents now had their albums being sold in places that previou

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2137
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)