For the recording industry, Bubba Sparxxx was not so much an artist as he was a proof of concept. His success signaled that Eminem was not a fluke, that the Vanilla Ice curse had been lifted. Surely excited about the prospect of marketing another caucasian emcee to the masses, when Jimmy Iovine, the same exec who pushed Slim Shady, happened upon Bubba's independent release, titled Dark Days, Bright Nights in 2000, he heard something that he could sell. Interscope recruited hitmakers Organized Noize & Timbaland to rejigger the indie release into a major-label debut & capitalize on the newfound viability of white rappers in the mainstream.
I know that Bubba felt deeply ambivalent about all this. Like I wrote in reference to Haystak, white rappers spend a lot of time thinking about our whiteness. To the extent that it hinders our acceptance in Black spaces, it's generally unwise to mention (unless you're Haystak) lest we come off as entitled culture vultures. To the extent that it helps, it confers a responsibility both to use that privilege productively & to prove that we can hang, irrespective of race. Like anything else involving race, there's a tension between the need to emphasize that it shouldn't matter while admitting that it does. In short, white emcees are disproportionately likely to rap with chips on our shoulders.
Let us not bury the lede, though: Bubba can, & always could, rap his fucking ass off, with a sharp delivery & a gift for novel & casually poetic turns of phrase. He makes extended use of 2, 3, or even 4-syllable rhyme pairs, & his pocket flow is usually metrically consistent. He will frequently string his bars together by using the rhyme that ended the previous line to begin the next one ("But until that day, y'all in deep doo-doo/I never once saw you crank it 'cuz I just leap through you/What you need to do is just admit you love me.") Bubba certainly didn't invent this technique, but he uses it so often that I think of it as a trademark.
The 2001 Interscope release titled Dark Days, Bright Nights is a bit of a fix-up Frankenstein. Half of the album survives from the original, with the 9 tracks produced by Timbo & ONP having been added for the major-label version. Of course the heavy hitter here is "Ugly," which is envisioned by Tim as a companion piece to Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On," with its tremolo guitar picking & wordless choral vocals. ONP gets in a few classics too, like "All the Same" with its lazy blues guitar & Sleepy Brown's inimitable croon, & they pull out their trademark horns for "Bubba Sparxxx." A few of the Fat Shan beats that survive from the indie release stand toe-to-toe with the bigger-name producers, like the moody title track & "Well Water" with its (ironically) Timbaland-esque percussion.
The choice of Timbo & ONP to shepherd Bubba's major-label debut should clue us in to something, if it wasn't already obvious: Bubba Sparxxx is not only the 1st white rapper to be sold to the mainstream post-Eminem; he is the 1st mainstream white rapper ever to be marketed specifically to Southerners. Given the '90s Southern rap ascendancy, it was only a matter of time. The album packaging, with its chain-link license plate frame layout, racing stripes, camo & lottery scratchers, appeals specifically to "white trash" Southerners, but Bubba's lyrics are more complex. On at least 2 songs (the title track & "All the Same"), he explicitly describes his intention to bring white & Black Southerners together with his music: "All that blood we shed will do nothing but serve their purpose/So let's unite these bright nights & dark days, then see who nervous." Recognizing this, & seeing how Bubba referenced his own race less & less as his career progressed, we can make some assumptions about how he felt about being marketed as the Great White-Trash Hope.
The reason I always tended to spin this CD less frequently than Deliverance is because, frankly, Bubba sounds a bit immature here. He always had a talent for deeper discourse, but on this record he mostly reserves it for the title track & "Well Water." This is a good-time party record, with no fewer than 4 songs aimed directly at the dancefloor. Also, knowing what I know about him & his struggles with sobriety, it's difficult to listen to bars like "I ain't good for shit but drinking, do some rapping in between." Still, though I might not reach for it as often as Deliverance (or even his pair of Colt Ford-assisted comeback albums, Pain Management & Made on McCosh Mill Road), Dark Days, Bright Nights is a fascinating historical document of a time when putting major-label money behind a white rapper was still a throw of the dice--specifically the fuzzy ones from the rearview mirror of an F-150.
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