Three decades after hip-hop first cracked the Top 40, white MCs remain, first and foremost, a joke: fodder for sketch-comedy routines, YouTube parodies and reality TV. Eminem is the exception that proves the rule, and he had to create an outsize tragicomic persona — the trailer-trash bane of Middle America — to justify his existence. In a culture saturated by hip-hop, shouldn't anyone be able to spit rhymes without shame, apology or having to crack jokes about his Star Wars action-figure collection?

Enter Asher Roth, a gangly redhead from the Philadelphia suburbs. Roth's tight, witty debut lives up to the Internet hype that has swirled around him for months. In the thudding "Lark on My Go-Kart," Roth calls himself a "dork" and says he has "hair like a troll doll." But he keeps the nerd-boy self-deprecation to a minimum and acts, you know, like a rapper: boasting nimbly (and often hilariously) about getting girls ("Lion's Roar") and getting high ("Blunt Cruisin'") over chipper beats by newcomer Oren Yoel. Roth's timbre and cadence will remind listeners of Eminem, a subject he addresses head-on in "As I Em." But he is his own man — a blithe braggart, untroubled by the need to keep it real. And that white rapper's albatross? He dismisses it with a couplet: "My friends said, 'Homey, you know that you're white, dude'/I said, 'What, for real? It's all good.'"