Looking at Rittz, there are probably three things you’ll notice immediately: His extremely long, bushy hair; his beard; and his skin color. One of those visual markers in particular — his race — has become especially notable given his chosen profession: Rapper.
“I’m allowed to rap about it, because it’s something I deal with,” Rittz told MTV News, explaining why he wrote the song “White Rapper,” which appears on his album Next to Nothing, which dropped in September. But his major concern when dealing with that issue isn’t critics, fans or others in the industry.
“There are a lot of things I deal with in my personal life,” he explained. “I did the BET Hip-Hop Awards and I had my grandma watch it. My grandma stayed up late to watch these awards; she doesn’t listen to rap. I don’t blame her for not understanding — but I’m on the BET Awards, you can watch me on your TV, I finally made it grandma, look! [The next day], I said, ‘Did you watch it on TV last night grandma?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I watched it. It was good.’ And she said, ‘You always wanted to be black.’”
Of course, that wasn’t the response he was expecting or hoping for, riding high from a career highlight to that point.
“Sh-t like that pisses me off,” the Georgia native admits. “It’s like, Damn, that’s all you got from that? So, a lot of the white rapper stuff comes from other white people. A girlfriend’s parents, or people at your job not taking you seriously: ‘You’re a white rapper, huh?’ That’s why I felt like I wanted to name it that.”
“I’m sure that there are a hundred other white rapper songs, and I don’t want my album to turn into this big White Rapper Thing, it’s just something I had to address. I practice so hard at being a good rapper. It’s just like practicing at a sport. I put a lot of effort into it, and then, at the end of the day, I just get called a ‘white rapper’? Can’t I just be called a ‘good rapper’?”
The track — which is accompanied by a video filled with old home footage, following the bearded wonder from his younger years to today — is as much an examination of how his whiteness has factored into his journey as it is an in-depth and revelatory retelling of how he went from a kid loving hip-hop in the early ’90s to a Strange Music-signed indie force with a swarm of feverish fans.
“I was very close to quitting, and thinking about quitting rapping was not an option,” he says of the time before he caught his break around 2010. “I’ve said it in my head since I was 14 or 16 years old — that I’m gonna rap for a living. Next thing you know, I’m 29-years-old, I have zero money, everybody that I’m living with lost their jobs, the house is getting foreclosed. I’ve been through all these managers. The Atalanta circuit; the strip club circuit. All my connections that I had were gone.”
He was studying to get his GED, with hope all but gone that one day he’d make a living rapping, when things finally started to turn around.
“Literally, right when I hit bottom is when it all started happening. When I did the song for Yelawolf, ‘Box Chevy,’ he said, ‘I’mma come back and get you.’ I didn’t think he was gonna come back and get me. I was like, Well, that’s the end of my rap run after all them years. All that time I wasted trying to be a rapper.”
“And the motherf–ker came back! And I got to quit my job. And now I rap.”
Except doesn’t just rap. And he’s not just a white rapper. He’s a good rapper. Just listen to “White Rapper” or Next to Nothing for proof.
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