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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Rush Limbaugh and other angry conservatives mock John Kerry and the Dems for hanging with hip-hop stars. But they're dissing a key (and mostly white) bloc of youth voters.
Apr 23, 2004 | Republicans have never been able to rock. But can they learn to rap?
Bruce Springsteen told President Reagan's campaign in 1984 to stop using his anthem "Born in the USA" at rallies; he didn't want it to be associated with the Republicans. In the 2000 campaign George W. Bush received similar cease-and-desist requests from Sting, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, John Mellencamp and Los Lobos. Today, as the party unveils a major new push to land the 18- to 24-year-old vote, the GOP is again grappling with its fragile ties to pop culture. The party wants to appear open and hip while still waging a cultural war.
Prominent right-wing figures make a business of denouncing pop culture as coarse and crude, mocking the music and the message, especially hip-hop. (In the rap world, they'd be tagged as playa hatas.) That disconnect was highlighted last month when the Republican National Committee tried to put a fresh young face on the party by staging a high-profile voter registration drive outside MTV's studio in Times Square, complete with an 18-wheel rig that morphed into a soundstage and pumped out hip-hop hits. Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie even made a guest appearance on MTV's daily countdown show, "TRL."
On March 30, Sen. John Kerry appeared on an MTV news special for an interview, where he was asked about trends in popular music. "I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop," Kerry responded. "I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, because it's important."
Kerry's comments set off a furious backlash from conservatives, Rush Limbaugh being the loudest. "We need to understand rap, folks," Limbaugh told his listeners, in a mocking tone. "There's a lot of poetry and anger in this. Social energy. It's important. Look, it's one thing to say you like it, but to try to pass this off as something you've intellectually examined and assigned value to? Sorry, senator. Don't stand up for white music -- associate yourself with rap." (In the edited version of his comments on Limbaugh's Web site, his reference to defending "white music" is deleted.)
The animosity of culture warriors like Limbaugh (who is in the midst of a drug prosecution in Florida) could make it extremely difficult for the GOP to court young voters. Hip-hop, especially rap, long ago moved out of the ghetto into the center of mainstream suburban youth culture. That's why hip-hop record sales have surged in the last decade; why Sears, the purveyors of Main Street America, is rolling out hip-hop urban-wear sections for its stores this year; and why a spokesman for Sprite told the Wall Street Journal this week that rap "is the leader in terms of influencing pop culture today." Suddenly, being anti-rap means being anti-youth culture. That's not exactly where Republicans want to be as they make a play for college-age voters.
"When it comes to politics, Republicans have to take hip-hop seriously," says Bakari Kitwana, author of "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture" and the forthcoming "Why White Kids Love Hip Hop."
An RNC spokesperson rejects the notion idea that the GOP has a rap problem. "There's no reason to perceive the Republican Party as being anti-rap or anti-hip-hop," says Mary Ellen Grant. "We're reaching out far and wide to youth voters regardless of their musical preference." One hip-hop envoy to the GOP, Dana Mozier, who once worked with legendary rap act NWA and now works as a political activist and self-proclaimed hip-hop ambassador for the Republican Party, insists Republicans are open-minded. "I've been to the White House, met with members of the Cabinet, met with the leadership of the Republican National Committee, and these folks don't have any qualms about the nature of hip-hop," he says. "I find the Republican Party is more accepting than most people think."
