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The epilogue asks what conclusions can be drawn from this book’s stories about white rock musicians’ engagement with Black music and politics. Hip-hop and R&B, central to anti-racist protest today, have become fundamental to debates over white cultural appropriation of Black music, debates that have shifted away from rock as the genre has become less dominant. Hip-hop and R&B are widely understood as Black genres, and white performers such as Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus, Eminem, and Macklemore are concerned less with adapting them into new forms than with claiming the right to perform them at all. Today, the conversation around “woke” white musicians is no longer as utopian as during the 1960s, but rather levelheaded and pragmatic, foregrounding critiques of inequality and misrepresentation. White musicians continue to benefit from systemic racism that amplifies their voices over those of others. Yet many white musicians today continue to grapple with their own role in African American political struggles as well as the opportunities and responsibilities created by Black music. As white musicians and activists attempt to find ethical approaches to racial politics in the Black Lives Matter era, efforts made during the 1960s can provide both inspiration and perspective.

Released in 2002, Eminem’s song ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ signals itself as a child’s rebellion in its title by alluding to the common parental demand to clean up private space in the family home and using this as a metaphor for emotionally and mentally exorcising past traumas inflicted by the parent. Presented as an image of the repository for the clutter and ‘skeletons’ of the past, the closet is also both the psyche of the singer and a representation of the child’s space in relation to the mother, ultimately the womb. While acknowledging the formal difference between poetry and music lyrics, from a literary perspective it is worth considering how ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ has several facets in common thematically with a poem that has undergone considerable critical analysis: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’. In her guise as confessional poet, Plath has had some direct and indirect influence on popular music. For example, Madonna has named Plath, whom she read as a teenager, as one of her inspirations, and in some respects the lyrics to her songs bear direct comparison with ‘Daddy’, as does Eminem’s.

This chapter examines three white hip-hop artists whose youth was spent consuming and producing hip-hop in interracial neighborhoods or friendship groups: Eminem, Danny Hoch, and Adam Mansbach. Their cultural immersion facilitated and strengthened social ties to black people. Here, the chapter uncovers long-term manifestations of racial sincerity, but it also registers moments of failure, when one or another succumbs to the privileges of whiteness or opts for the easier postures of authenticity rather than the ongoing work of struggle against racial injustice. Treating these three artists as consumers and producers of hip-hop culture, the chapter analyzes the racial politics and sincerity of their rap lyrics, theater performances, film, fiction, essays, interviews, and social activism. Without reducing the artistic complexity of their imaginative work, it considers their creative products as reception documents that reflect their understanding of the meanings and significance of hip-hop culture.

The music of white rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers III) has been denounced by women's groups, gay activists and politicians for its supposed expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and foul language. Using Eminem as a case study, this chapter explores how liberals must deal with words and music that they identify as Other, especially when that Otherness is significantly problematical. It discusses the relationship between pluralism and postmodernism by considering an idea proposed by Gary Tomlinson in his article ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz’, in which he calls the relationship a ‘parallactic conception’. It also considers dialogism as a valuable model for negotiating cultural pluralism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Eminem, and by implication rap music, could be seen to do cultural work other than simply providing material for alienated teenagers to exact revenge on their parents.

The third chapter examines the story of Detroit’s rebirth through both a reliance on its storied past and the possibilities of the future through an examination of a wildly successful commercial starring Eminem. It provides the connective tissue between the storied past of Detroitas as a location of workers and the contemporary narrative of a city on the rise. At its center is the mythic tale provided by the 2011 Chrysler “Born of Fire” commercial. The narrative tale of a rebirth of a city, and by extension the American auto industry, in the face of epic decline makes the story of Detroit the ultimate comeback tale—a phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction.

Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers) has attracted much scholarly and media attention for his abilities as a rhymer as well as the controversial content of his lyrics and his possible cultural appropriation. This chapter fills a gap in Eminem scholarship by examining his use of the vocal groove classes described in Chapter 4. Specifically, it shows how Eminem sequences vocal grooves in a way that creates rhythmic narratives of accruing metric complexity (i.e., the proportion of accented syllables not aligned with the beat or a beat’s midpoint). These rhythmic narratives often support and even foreshadow narrative events in lyrics. By documenting correlations between Eminem’s lyrics and his rhythmic choices, the chapter shows a new way in which flow connects music to text. The chapter closes by reflexively considering the historically problematic relationship between the analysis of music complexity and Afro-diasporic music.

This final chapter, a complement to Chapter 5, considers music “after emotion,” shaped by theories of affect. Affect attends to the microscopic nuances of feeling not captured by the “garden variety” emotional categories. I consider varieties of affect through stages of European modernism (from Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg to Boulez, Stockhausen, and Lachenmann), the neo-realism of “American Cool” (including Copland, Reich, and Cage), and then within a range of contemporary popular music (including Radiohead, Eminem, Beyoncé, and music for gaming). Regarding theories of affect, the chapter contextualizes these musical styles within two diverging “lines of flight” emanating, respectively, from the vitalism of Bergson and Deleuze, and the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. The chapter, and the book, concludes by asking why interest in musical emotion is so current.