TWENTY YEARS AGO, Grandmaster Melle Mel commemorated Jesse Jackson's initial run for the White House with a song simply titled "Jesse." The single didn't do much better than Jackson's campaign, barely scraping the lower reaches of the R&B charts, but it nonetheless marked hip-hop's first significant involvement in presidential politics.
Today, any serious Democratic presidential candidate has to kiss the ring of the hip-hop community sooner or later--no matter how ridiculous it makes him look. Thus, in election years comedy writers get the manna that keeps them in the business, such as when John Kerry made his pilgrimage to hip-hop Mecca. In an MTV interview, Kerry claimed to be "fascinated by rap and hip-hop," cleverly observed that "there's a lot of poetry in it," and delivered the sort of condescending cultural warning Northeastern liberals have imprinted in their DNA: "I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important."
It was an utterly lame performance, transparent to anyone with eyes and ears. Yet compared to his predecessors' pandering, Kerry's might actually have been an improvement.
In retrospect, it's surprising how little Bill Clinton attempted to exploit hip-hop. While he sometimes campaigned with Queen Latifah, his best-known brush with rappers remains his controversial 1992 takedown of Sister Souljah. Then again, after discovering he was the first black president, Clinton probably knew he had the hip-hop votes in the bag.
But the 2000 campaign showed Al Gore was neither Clinton nor Bulworth. After a college student challenged him to listen to activist rapper Mos Def, Gore emailed back, "Certainly, the artistry of the CD you gave me can't be questioned"--then admitted someone on his staff had swiped the disc from him. When he tried to talk the talk, things got worse: Gore offered Wyclef Jean the world's whitest "shout out" on New York's Hot 97, as he bragged about getting the rapper's endorsement.
IN THE INTERVENING FOUR YEARS, the hip-hop community has developed more sophisticated organization. Mogul Russell Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network is the most far-reaching new group trying to turn listeners into voters, but other Rock-the-Vote-type outfits abound. And the result was hardly unexpected.
Howard Dean trotted out his own devotion to Wyclef, telling a primary debate audience his favorite song was the former Fugee's "Jaspora" (a tune "you haven't heard of," Dean sniffed). To careful observers, this might have been the first sign of the impending, disastrous Gore endorsement. Dick Gephardt paid fealty to Midwestern homie Eminem, enthusing "I saw the movie [the Detroit rapper's semi-autobiographical turn in 8 Mile] and I like the movie, you know, the story of them growing up poor and so on." Even Wes Clark, who named aging rockers Journey as his favorite music act, joked about the rumored split of hip-hop duo OutKast, in a Rock-the-Vote commercial.
Only Dennis Kucinich acknowledged that "I do not claim to know the names of the top ten greatest MCs of all time or who has the hottest Hip Hop album on Billboard at this moment." But Kucinich didn't let that stop him from drafting an "Open Letter To The Hip-Hop Community" touting his "inner-city" upbringing and gushing that hip-hop listeners are "the leaders we have been waiting for."
SO WHY DOES the hip-hop world, for whom "keeping it real" is so often a manifesto, reward some of the most ridiculous fibs told in American politics? One answer is the silence on the other side of the ballot: Republicans, who could engage hip-hop listeners via issues where there's potential common ground (education, entrepreneurship), rarely do so. And the hip-hop community, like most embryonic voting blocs, will take its access where it can find it. "At least he's paying attention" is the common defense the music's fans offer of the aforementioned Democratic suck-ups.
Whether hip-hop voters can expect much more than that down the road is another question. The Democrats' empty praise of hip-hop mirrors the empty solutions--substandard schools, lowered standards, the touting of affirmative action as the panacea for every ill--the party routinely offers to address the concerns of minorities, blacks in particular. It's what a party does when it knows it can get away with paying lip service to a group of voters--like the hip-hop fans now dazzled by the Democrats.
Sure, there's always the chance some charismatic figure--a Russell Simmons or P. Diddy or Jay-Z--could lead a defection of hip-hop voters to Ralph Nader in November, or simply tell them to stay home. But in this Anyone-But-Bush year, that's unlikely. The best bet is that in 2008, we'll be listening to a certain New York senator-turned-presidential candidate talking about her love for Lil' Kim, and wondering if the Democrats will ever get the bad rap they deserve for pandering to the hip-hop set.
Dan LeRoy, a writer in Connecticut, has written about hip-hop for Vibe and other magazines.
