Monday, 24 August 2009

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  Understanding White People, Part 2

  (For Understanding White People, Part 1, go here.)
  

  I recently took a Facebook quiz entitled “How White Are you?” and I got the result “25%”.  Without even considering the sociopolitical ramifications that arise from posing such a question, it’s obvious that my result was completely bogus.  By most accounts, I am 100% Filipino.  However, what “Filipino” is seems to be a cause for debate lately.  On one side of the issue are normal people and educated citizens who believe that “Filipinos” are those whose genealogical history can be traced back to peoples from the Philippines archipelago.  On the other side of the issue are colonial-minded, self-hating weirdos who say that Filipinos are (as Vanessa Hudgens identified herself) “mostly white, but within them have Spanish and Chinese.”  Both of these arguments might be true, but it’s the latter one that might justify the result of my quiz.  Perhaps Vanessa Hudgens works for Facebook.  How the hell should I know?  I’m not a website master.

  In any case, after taking that quiz my girlfriend intelligibly pointed out that I am, in fact, becoming more and more “white.”  She shrewdly referenced the fact that I own all ten seasons of Friends on DVD and that I’ve seen every episode at least ten times.  More so, she pointed out that my favorite thing to do in my spare time is to hang out at Starbucks with my laptop computer. 

  I was beginning to see her point.

  But, most ostensibly, she reminded me that my girlfriend (herself) was white.  Considering our country’s social and political history, a relationship like ours (between an Asian guy and a white girl) is a social anomaly and shouldn’t exist unless the guy completely exonerates himself from all qualities of “Asian-ness”.  (This is in contrast to a white guy and Asian girl couple, which America finds wholly acceptable.  In most of these cases, the girl is encouraged to embrace her ethnic background to satisfy the guy’s fetish.  At least, that’s what I learned in my Ethnic Studies classes at the University of California at San Diego.)

  While there may be some qualities about me that are becoming more and more “white,” there is at least one quality about me that will never become “white,” and that is my good taste in music.  That is something that I don’t foresee changing in the future, and that’s mostly because white peoples’ taste in music is sometimes nonsensical.  Their taste in music is most insane when they embrace music that was originally intended by non-whites but was discarded and ostracized by them.

  I’ve compiled a list of ten of these songs.  If there ever comes a time when I like more than half of these songs, then I suppose I will have become “white”.

  Manilajones’ Top Ten List of Songs That Were Originally Intended for Non-whites but White People Ended Up Liking Them Instead:

  10.  Low by Flo Rida:  Being the number one rap song by any rapper named after a state, the whiteness of this song was best epitomized by Tom Cruise’s dance scene in Tropic Thunder.

  9.  Brass Monkey by the Beastie Boys:  In 1985 the Beastie Boys were signed to Def Jam records, the country’s largest, exclusively rap record label.  At a time when rap music was popular mostly among black people, this song became the anthem to white fraternities nationwide.

  8.  Funky Cold Medina by Tone Loc:  This is an average rap song, at best, from the Golden Age of hiphop.  I don’t really know why white people love this song, but I suspect it’s because of its music video, which shows Tone using an alcoholic beverage as a date rape drug.  Everyone knows that black people don’t commit date rape!

  7.  It Takes Two by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock:  This was the song that introduced rap music to most of the white kids in my elementary school.

  6.  Good Vibrations by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch:   It’s still unclear whether Mark Wahlberg is a better actor now or in the early 1990s when he was the angry lead rapper for the Funky Bunch.

  5.  The Power by Snap!:  In the early 1990s, there were two eerily similar dance songs called The Power.  One was by the German electronic group Snap!, and the other was by American rapper Chill Rob G.  The Chill Rob G version was a respectable hiphop song, while the Snap! version went on to dominate American pop charts.   It’s only a rumor that this song was inspired by He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

  4.  Any song ever made by the Black Eyed Peas:  This needs no explanation.

  3.  Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot:  His famous ode to ass has white girls wishing they were black.

  2.  Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C+C Music Factory:  Hardcore rap in the early 1990s paved the way for hardcore industrial dance music.  Unfortunately, this backfired and, instead of urban hipsters, this song is now a favorite among white people who can’t dance and gay steel mill workers in the Pittsburgh area.

  1.  Hey Ya by Outkast:  From the early 1990s to 2003, Outkast was at the vanguard of the southern hiphop movement.  When they released Hey Ya in 2004, the had black people saying, "What the fuck?" and white people saying, "There's a new band called Outkast that's totally rad!"
  

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