SECOND RESPONSE
I was thinking this week about what Mark aptly called our generation’s penchant for “black on black candor.” This kind of radical truth-telling has always been a part of black culture, of course, but hip hop has a way of putting it on blast. Just like both Natalies, I fear that should Obama become president he would inevitably confront a backlash borne of unreasonable expectations. “He’s a sellout.” “You know, he is biracial after all.” “We need to elect the first black president—for real this time!” Just as hip hop has provided the unofficial soundtrack to Obama’s rise, it could do the same for his fall.
___Calling people out, after all, is what hip hop does best. Rap is rebel music, even when its aim is no more than defending a “gotta get mine” perspective. While there’s no precedent for how rap might relate to a President Obama, we can find close approximations. Back in 1996, a couple years before Toni Morrison famously dubbed Bill Clinton the first “black president,” Tupac Shakur had a different message for him: “Bill Clinton, Mr. Bob Dole, you’re too old to understand the way the game’s told.” Pac’s meaning was clear: it doesn’t matter how “down” you think you are, you’ll never understand.
___Obama, of course, is different from Bill Clinton, and not simply by virtue of pigmentation. As Scott says, there’s something about Obama’s swagger that says hip hop even when he doesn’t. I’ll take it a step further and say that Obama and hip hop share a common connection on what the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man called the “lower frequencies”—those ties that bind us beyond worldly concerns like race and politics. One of those frequencies is art. All of our first responses—mine included—neglected this major factor in hip hop’s relation to Obama: the way that Obama has provided a source of artistic, not just political or personal, inspiration for hip hop.
___Hip hop was born, as KRS-One once said, in response to the “reality of lack.” While a spirit of opposition is its birthright, a necessary stance against unjust circumstance and the exercise of coercive power, hip hop is primarily a cultural revolution—expressed in language, sound, image, and movement. Therefore, any political message it contains is necessarily tied up in the impulse to make something beautiful. When rap lyrics are concerned, it’s important to remember that the MC’s first imperative is to rhyme in rhythm to the beat. Whether offering incisive political invective, vacuous material boasts, or outright gibberish, MCs must satisfy an audience’s lust for rhythm. After all, wasn’t rap born in “a-hip hop, the-hippy, the-hippy to the hip hip-hop you don’t stop”?
___Whatever else Obama’s candidacy means to hip hop, it also means that MCs have a versatile new word in their rhyme arsenal. OBAMA. Even a conscious head can appreciate that! As Talib Kweli told CNN back in August, “More than anything, his name is a nugget of lyrical gold. It sounds like a gunshot going off. . . . ‘Obama’ rhymes with a lot of things.” A spot-check of the near- and perfect-rhymes MCs have imagined so far includes, “no drama,” “Osama,” “Madonna,” “Botswana,” “Como se llama,” and, of course, “yo mama.” And that’s just for starters . . .
___K’naan, the Toronto-based rapper from Somalia who spits verses with as sharp a political edge as anyone in the game right now, emphasizes the centrality of art above all else in rap. “It’s how you say what you’re saying that counts,” he recently told popmatters.com. “It’s also a responsibility. If you have music with a message, you still have to make it beautiful enough so that people appreciate it regardless of the message.” Hip hop will undoubtedly have many more messages for Obama in the months and years ahead. They’ll be messages of hope and heartache, fear and frustration, concern and, perhaps come November, celebration. Whatever they are, just make them beautiful.
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