Recently, Saturday Night Live said the quiet part out loud, trying to make fun of white Souncloud rappers as being Inauthentic:

Now, I don’t have a dog in the hunt of what is and is not Hip-Hop. I don’t care that much about it. But the skit proves the opposite of the intended joke. Queen Latifah (no, that’s not actually Queen Latifah, but I don’t know the actress’ name, and it doesn’t mater for my purposes here) and Questlove are not in a position to gatekeep Hip-Hop. That isn’t how any of this works.

But the story of the white boy who stole the blues is never as simple as his critics would have it. American pop culture begins in the mongrel, not the Platonic. This is hip’s central story. What we call black or white styles are really hopelessly hybrid. The bebop of Minton’s, for example, brought African and European impulses to a music that already traced its lineage to both continents. Even in the name of purity it was impure, and richer for it. By the same token Goodman, Twain, Berlin, Elvis, and Eminem all stand out more for what is uniquely theirs, not the vehicle they borrowed. In a pluralistic cultural marketplace, it makes more sense to think of pop evolution as additive rather than derivative — every change adds something, even if just through the accidents of faulty copying.

-John Leland, Hip: The History, pg. 133

That which spreads to the masses becomes theirs. Kurt Cobain couldn’t stop it from happening, and neither can Questlove. Rage at Soundcloud rappers is just the new version of Ewan MacColl groaning about that teenybopper Bob Dylan’s insufficient devotion to the gospel of folk music:

Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time …’But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers … Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel”

-Ewan MacColl, Sing Out, September 1965

“Queen Latifah” herself said it: it’s just culture now. and if it’s culture, then everyone has access to it, and can do with it whatever they want.

Go ahead and get on YouTube and search for “yeet yeet skirt” and see how much madness you win. The search bar will complete it for you. It is viral now, and everyone who groans about MiSsInG tHe PoInT is actually Missing the Joke. The Beastie Boys have spent the last forty years saying that “Fight for Your Right to Party” was supposed to be ironic. No one cares.

When you conquer the world, the world also conquers you. Every empire and every culture discovers this, the hard way.