Hip-Hop Barack: He Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

“It’s Obama time.” At least that’s what Vibe magazine proclaimed when presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) graced the cover of its September issue. For a magazine that usually chooses big players in the hip-hop game to sell copies, the choice clearly indicated that the hip-hop community is watching Obama closely.

Obama has been getting plenty of attention from the hip-hop arists themselves too. Common drops his name in his new album’s lead single, “The People,” with the lyrics “Barack stick, knight the people like Obama.” Chinese-American rapper Jin even wrote a song called “Open Letter 2 Obama” that got major play on his MySpace page. But whether Obama truly is the hip-hop generation's candidate of choice - or if the generation can even speak with one voice - is still unclear.

“You have someone who comes along, who’s youngish, understands some of the same struggles that we’ve been going through,” said author and journalist Jeff Chang, who interviewed Obama for the Vibe cover story. “It makes sense for a magazine like Vibe to start covering Obama and the larger issue of politics.”

Being young and black is enough to attract attention to Obama's candidacy, Chang said.

“It's part of what makes him a fresh face, it makes his point of view different from people who have come before,” he said.

Some hip-hop artists agreed that Obama's appearance, along with his personal history and personality, allow the hip-hop generation to relate to him more than they do to any of the other presidential candidates.

“I think he’s dynamic, he’s charismatic,” said Kamikaze, a hip-hop artist and activist from Jackson, Miss. “As hip-hop artists, we appreciate...someone who’s not robotic, stiff.”

The majority of politicians don’t understand the struggles of the hip-hop community, he said. And therefore they rarely address them.

But there is also hope that Obama will bring to the national stage many of the issues important to the hip-hop generation, Chang said. Although he was disappointed that Obama didn’t say much about college affordability during the Vibe interview, Chang said Obama did discuss the obstacles facing youth in urban areas.

“He’s still trying to figure out what it is about his candidacy that attracts young people,” he said. “A lot of the issues that are closest to us are issues that haven’t been in the mainstream discussion of politics in 30 years or more.”

Some of the issues that most concern the hip-hop community are the prison industrial complex, police accountability, the effects on New Orleans from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the housing crisis, said Shamako Noble, president of the Hip Hop Congress, a non-profit organization that uses hip-hop culture to involve youth in social action and civil service.

Yet many in the community are not sure if Obama would even support the “hip-hop platform.” Mainstream society considers the issue of police accountability to be far-left rhetoric, but it is an issue at the heart of urban youth issues, Noble said.

Some in the hip-hop community remain skeptical about supporting Obama, and not all the attention he has received has been positive.

Around the time of the Don Imus controversy, Obama was quoted by the The Associated Press as saying hip-hop artists shared responsibility in promoting degrading language. Russell Simmons, hip-hop mogul and co-founder of Def Jam Records, fired back.

“My response to Sen. Obama is that you have to talk about the poverty and ignorance that creates such a climate that the poets can talk like that. People who are angry, uneducated and come from tremendous struggle, they have poetic license and they say things that offend you," Simmons told ABC News.

Obama spoke to Chang about how he was quoted in the media at the time and said that, although he understood what the struggle was for many of hip-hop artists, the industry is influential and should start taking that into account, Chang said.

But while Noble said he agreed that the hip-hop community should take some responsibility for youth violence, education and misogyny, he said the whole country must also participate in solving these problems.

“[The] hip-hop community can only take so much responsibility,” he said.

So should Obama be considered the hip-hop candidate?

During a radio interview with Hot 97 in New York City, he said he prefers jazz and Stevie Wonder, but he said he does have a dash of Jay-Z and Beyonce on his iPod.

Yet during the Vibe interview, Obama insisted he was not a “hip” guy. He also declined when the photographer asked him to put on a pair of Air Force Ones for the photo shoot, Chang said. Still, Chang said the interview itself was proof of Obama's interest in the hip-hop vote.

“The fact that he decided to take [the interview] in the first place was an indication that he’s very concerned about communicating to the hip-hop generation,” he said.

But there may not even be a hip-hop vote to court. Kamikaze said the community does not contribute much money to campaigns and does not do enough to bring consumers of their music to the polls. There was progress in the last election with the “Vote or Die” campaign — with P. Diddy being one of the more memorable supporters — but the hip-hop community as a whole has yet to come up with a clear ideology, he said.

“We’re not organized enough to come together and have a platform,” Kamikaze said. “We’re not as serious a voting bloc as we would have believed.”

And although activism has always been a part of hip-hop, activists make up only a small percentage of the community, Kamikaze said.

Many in the hip-hop community are not informed enough to look beyond Obama’s appearance and charisma in deciding to support him politically, Noble said.

Kamikaze termed such race-based support “arbitrary.”

It’s still too early in the game to determine how closely Obama will associate with the hip-hop community, Noble said. But the hip-hop community certainly has an important voice, one that is broadcast on radio waves across the country, and has the potential to sway support for or against Obama’s candidacy.