Where Politics and Hip Hop Collide

By Maria Luisa Tucker, AlterNet. Posted November 14, 2005.

Last Monday night, Kwame Kilpatrick went on a club crawl of Detroit's liveliest bars and nightclubs. On Tuesday night, the 35-year-old African American ex-football player partied again until the early hours of the morning, this time at an election party. He was celebrating his own victory. Kilpatrick, America's first "hip hop mayor," had won a second term in office.

Despite a first term riddled with "youthful" mistakes -- most famously he admitted using city dollars to lease a Lincoln Navigator for his wife -- Kilpatrick was resilient. He relied on his base of young African-Americans, a risky bet since young people have notoriously low voter turnout rates. But as the youngest mayor ever elected in Detroit and a member of the so-called "hip hop generation," he pulled it off.

The hip hop generation that Kilpatrick belongs to is defined loosely as minorities born between 1965 and 1984 who have grown up within a culture of hip hop music, dance, fashion and art. They are the first generation born in a post-Jim Crow society, and were raised largely in urban neighborhoods that have exemplified both the successes and ironies of the civil rights movement.

Even with legal equality, schools remained largely segregated. Despite an ever increasing black middle class, black and brown people remained over-represented among the ranks of the poor and unemployed. As the hip hop generation has come of age, many of its members have reacted to these realities by forming or participating in an array of social justice organizations. Only a few have gotten involved in electoral politics; Kilpatrick was elected in 2001, and poet and hip hop activist Ras Baraka was appointed Newark's deputy mayor in 2002 after an earlier unsuccessful run for mayor.

Like Kilpatrick himself, hip hop's growing presence in electoral politics has shown itself to be controversial, awkwardly unpredictable -- and incredibly charismatic. In 2004, it was not clear if the highly publicized hip hop voter registration drives, such as Sean "P. Diddy" Comb's "Vote or Die!" campaign (in which Kilpatrick participated), marked the beginning of a political movement, or simply a trend during a dramatic election year. A year later, it seems that hip hop's place in politics is continuing to grow. The collaborations and organizations that sprung up from the 2004 election are, for the most part, stronger than ever. If a national hip hop political movement was in its infancy last year, then this year it's beginning its uncomfortable adolescence.

"The election was really important. It was really the first time you saw this sort of effort on both the celebrity level and the grassroots level that came together around one big thing," says Jeff Chang, hip hop journalist and author of Can't Stop, Won't Stop. But he likens the trajectory of the hip hop's political movement to entropy--it tends toward disorder and randomness. "The hip hop political movement is not something that has a monolithic look to it. You're talking about folks working day in and day out on a range of issues. What unites them is the fact that there has been massive generational change since the civil rights movement. The question is, how to do you harness something that looks like entropy?"

It's a good question with about a million answers. As a political movement, hip hop is finding itself and just about everything is up for debate: who its leaders should be, who the movement represents, and how to harmonize hip hop's historical resistance against the establishment with a new urge to participate in mainstream politics. The people who made 2004 such a big year for hip hop are, in 2005, proposing very different ways to carry forward.

The Grassroots Organizers

"Hip hop has always been political," says Rosa Clemente, a New York-based activist and co-host for WBAI's (99.5 FM/NYC) show, "Where We Live." "Hip hop can be used to show resistance against oppression; that's what it was in the beginning and that's what it continues to be."

Since its birth in the Bronx, hip hop has certainly welcomed lyrics about oppression, resistance to the white establishment, and blunt challenges to government, from N.W.A.'s hit "Fuck Tha Police" in 1988, to Jadakiss' 2004 song "Why?" which asked "Why did Bush knock down the towers." With a history of Afro-centric nationalism, gangsta rap and graffiti art, hip hop had never been used as a means of assimilation into mainstream (white) culture. It has always been more likely to dismiss electoral politics in favor of localized social justice work.

Clemente, who identifies herself as a black Puerto Rican grassroots organizer, was part of the surge in the 1990s of activists who tied their social justice work closely to hip hop culture. Her professional history could be easily mistaken for notes on hip hop's political agenda. She has tackled issues including youth organizing, prison rights, African-American/Latino relations, racism in South Africa, and ethnic disparities in health care. On the roster of larger organizations she's affiliated with is the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which was founded in Brooklyn in 1993 to focus on self-determination and community building. Through its Central Brooklyn Cop Watch and Political Prisoner Amnesty Campaign, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement also deals with two ever-present issues for African-Americans and Latinos: police brutality and discrimination in the criminal justice system. For Clemente, the key word when it comes to hip hop's political future is self-determination.

Maria Luisa Tucker is an AlterNet staff writer.

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