News > Politics
The Audacity Of Hip-Hop
Loading ...
Far from being politically alienated and bling-obsessed, the rap generation may be just months away from occupying the White House.
Imani Cheers and Crystal Holmes
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Sep 25, 2008 | Updated: 3:31 p.m. ET Sep 25, 2008
When superstar lyricist Nas declared, “Hip-hop is dead!” in 2006, he reignited a long-running debate among artists and observers in the rap community. While the money-guns-girls wing of commercial rap is certainly here to stay, many fans insist that hip hop’s political roots are rotting. But on the eve of an election in which a presidential candidate is a professed Jay-Z fan who brushes off his shoulders in speeches and fist-bumps his wife, it appears that the political soul of hip hop is primed for a reawakening.
It’s no secret that the most widely covered news stories involving hip hop in the last few years have been less than flattering. Rapper Ludacris recently made headlines with a pro-Obama song he released in July. On “Politics as Usual,” he rhymes in support of Obama about Sen. John McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton: “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant; McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralyzed.” The lyrics prompted an Obama campaign spokesman to condemn the song as “outrageously offensive.” Then there was Don Imus’s referral to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” last April. What followed was a national backlash that pinpointed commercial rap as the source of the kind of misogyny many felt he had aimed at a group of young black women. The Imus comment, and the anti-rap fallout, became such a big deal that Oprah devoted a show to the subject of misogyny in rap music. Hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons and rapper Common appeared on the show, defending rap artists as poets who simply paint pictures of the world as they see it.
You might also like
|
|
|
|
|
