Who's Afraid of 'White Boy Summer'?

A year later hip-hop's 50th anniversary and just weeks after Kendrick Lamar's feud with Drake culminated in a chart-topping track where he calls Drake a “colonizer,” the hottest topic on the rap internet right now is a white kid from St. rapping over vintage Atlanta rap beats. Ian, whose debut mixtape, Valedictorian, capping off a string of viral hits that quickly caught the attention and ire of rap fans online, he leans heavily into the dissonance between his look and sound. In the video for his From the square implementation, sits at a table in a beautiful suburban home, tapping into the microphone as his quintessentially white American family passes dishes back and forth. His mixtape opens with prolific Atlanta rap figure DJ Holiday joking, “This is the coldest mama I've seen in ages, dressed in white as hell though.”

Ian's straightforward song, “Figure It Out,” quickly reached one million streams on SoundCloud when it was released in February. By that point, he had made a decent name for himself in underground circles, with melodic, slightly more melodic raps over left-field, industrial-sounding production. “Figure It Out” introduced a new sound, complete with trap drums and a slight southern drawl. Even so, to Ian's credit, there's a lo-fi sensibility to his vocals that adds something special to his delivery. It stands to reason that his most common comparison is with Yeat. Occupying a space between hip-hop, rock and electronic music, Yeat's meteoric rise in recent years is a perfect representation of the current generation of young rap fans, whose early experiences with music were far less culturally specific than previous eras.

But Ian is only part of a larger continuum of white artists taking up space in black music, a trend you can trace back to Elvis. The difference now is how quickly and deeply styles are consumed in today's landscape. Ian may well be the better white rapper we've seen in a while, but not for skill or competence. The proliferation of rap online, particularly with the rise of social video platforms like TikTok, has fostered an environment where cultural voyeurism is largely the norm. No scene or subculture can exist outside the mainstream when smartphones are ubiquitous. A generation of musicians from all backgrounds raised on a diet of Chief Keef and XXXTentacion is now growing up — it was only a matter of time before we saw a wave of white, neighborhood rap artists. Atlanta he even joked in the fourth episode of his final season that the rappers are enlisted “Young White Avatars” to make it on the charts.

Another inescapable example at the moment is Tommy Richman's hit “Million Dollar Baby,” which opens with the line “I ain't never repped a set, baby,” and slyly plays on the juxtaposition of Richman's look and sound. One tweet compared him to Bobby Caldwell, the jazz and R&B singer responsible for hits like 1979's “What won't you do for love,” and who many fans spent years thinking was Black. (I'll bet at least one person reading this is coming across this information for the first time.) As with the late Caldwell, Tommy Richman and Ian are not engaging in the cynical harassment of, say, Lil Mabu, the prep-Schoolboy New York rapper whose music doesn't have an ounce of self-awareness or respect for rap culture. Ian's music, for example, isn't that bad. Just as Yeat's sonic palette manages to give his music a distinctive sensibility, Ian's vocal style—an airy, controlled delivery that feels as indebted to Atlanta rap as it does to contemporary pop acts like Billie Eilish—is a fascinating evolution of an admittedly well-worn formula. The same goes for Richman, who laid the groundwork to evolve his sound into something more than mere imitation.

The current moment brings to mind the seemingly endless jokes about a supposed “White Boy Summer,” popularized in 2021 by Chet Hanks, the son of Tom Hanks, whose penchant for Caribbean patois catapulted him to viral fame a year earlier after a clip on the red carpet at the Golden Globes where his voice and appearance offered a similar kind of dissonance as Ian. Last week, the younger Hanks went viral once more after sharing a screenshot of him explaining the intricacies of Drake and Kendrick's feud with his dad via text, a perfect microcosm of the moment as rap culture filters through the mass audience created on social media and moves away from any origin in Black MUSIC. Chet Hanks also made an appearance Atlanta.

Pitchfork's Alphonse Pierre wrote recently: “There is something disturbing about ian's rapid rise. He stumbled upon a simple, repetitive design that absorbs Black influences while presenting and marketing itself as if it isn't.” On TikTok, many creators have pointed out the often transactional relationship with rap culture that exists for some white artists, noting how Post Malone rose to fame making Southern rap tracks before his more recent turn to country music.

Even so, there's no doubting rap's current place in mainstream culture. This is the language in which young people of all races have come to understand the world. It is indeed an existential moment for the genre as its commercial interests move further away from its origins, but as Vince Staples recently said Rolling rock, it was a good run. “If hip-hop dies, the Black voice doesn't die,” he says. We're living through a moment in rap history that certainly seems strange to older generations, but that doesn't mean black music is in danger of disappearing — it's just changing.

I get “White Boy Wasted” by Houston rapper Mighty Bay, who has amassed tens of millions of plays on TikTok thanks to a video of the rapper and his friends dressed in the same clothes Ian wears on his album cover, subverting the essentialist idea of ​​a racist aesthetic better than Ian might think he does. While there is a real concern that white acts could one day be copied by record companies at the expense of developing black talent, it is more likely that black artists will continue to innovate faster than they can be copied.