The week in gay internet drama: Asher Roth

Toilet stool rapper…

Who would have thought a week that began with the “Run DMC on the cover of Rolling Stone for a new generation” cross-genre victory of “I Love College” being the first ever track to make it to #2 on the prestigious “MTV2 Myspace Chart” could end in such ignominy for Asher Roth?

Brief timeline. On April 20, hip-hop’s #1 Dylan Klebold lookalike drops an album on the tenth anniversary of Columbine. It goes on to sell 30,000 less in its first week than the latest album by A-list heavily promoted superstar rapper Jadakiss. Throughout the week, the number of hip-hop bloggers writing about how Roth has changed the game for what it means to go platinum in rap nowadays slowly dwindles.

April 23. In a stunning display of foresight, Roth, who has long been rumoured to be a white man, makes a crack about hanging with “nappy headed hoes” on his Twitter account. Rather than taking advantage of Roth’s college education to quiz him on whether or not the correct plural form of “ho” is “hoes”, “hos” or “ho’z”, most people instead take him to task for him having a bit of a “racial moment”.

April 23, slightly later in the day: Roth (‘s PR team on damage limitation exercises) deletes the, cough, “tweet” and hopes nobody notices.

April 24: blogosphere goes nuts, like that one dude from that song from five years ago people still for some unknown reason reference. Internet is absolutely packed full of gems of comments on this, but arguably nobody comes harder than some guy on Nah Right who says “Roth referred to no ethnic group in particular. ‘Hanging with some nappy headed hoes’ could be talking about jewish hoes, black hoes, puerto rican hoes, samoan hoes”. Someone check some old Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. videos to see how nappy the hair was there.

Also on the 24th, Nah Right’s Eskay says on his Twitter account that he’s “waiting to hear @asherroth’s side of the story”. Most people are stunned that Eskay is on Twitter, being as that website consists entirely of posts that have less than 140 characters in and are mainly regurgitated bits of information from elsewhere with no original insight or thought or wait I can’t even be bothered to finish this sentence.

April 27: I briefly consider the possibilities of a quick cash-in “Asleep In The Bread Aisle”/”Deeper Than Rap” mashup album called “Asher Rawse”. Leave it for the time being.

April 28: Eskay posts his term paper on whether or not Asher Roth is a racist over at Nah Right, promises the site will never post Asher Roth content until he apologises to the black community, keeps up Asher Roth banners on his website just because. Internet has one final shitstorm of comment leaving before we all go home, agree that Roth said a dumb thing and should make some sort of concession, and hope that maybe he’s learned from all this and emerged a better person.

April 29: Associated Press reports Roth as saying in an interview: “All these black rappers – African rappers – talking about how much money they have. Do you realize what’s going on in Africa right now? It’s just like, ‘You guys are disgusting. Talking about billions and billions of dollars you have. And spending it frivolously, when you know, the Motherland is suffering beyond belief right now.” Internet pauses again for a while as it considers whether Roth was taking shots at Akon and MC Solaar, or whether he’s just a fucking racist. What Roth’s unable to bring to the table in terms of high-end content, he sure makes up for in handwringing potential. This one should run and run until the end of his career. So August, then.

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