Did Hip Hop Artists Bring African Americans to the Polls?

Hip hop and politics have never really been separate. When hip hop first started to gain mainstream popularity in the 80's and 90's, groups like Public Enemy made it a regular policy to rap about current issues. Since then however, mainstream hip hop music has been more likely to dialogue on drugs and gangs than politics. Barack Obama's candidacy seemed to reawaken hip hop's political soul, and in return, hip hop just might have helped put Obama in the White House.

On March 4, 2008, hip hop artist Jay-Z recorded a robo-call on behalf of Barack Obama. In it he urged his listeners to make it to the polls, and bring their friends and neighbors. Not long before the robo-call, Obama gave a non-verbal nod to Jay-Z when he "brushed his shoulders off" during a rally in North Carolina. In one of the rapper's most popular songs, Jay-Z urges listeners to metaphorically shrug off the "haters" and stand proud by brushing the dirt off their shoulders. Although Obama never explicitly or officially explained the physical gesture, audience members at the rally understood - in seconds they were on their feet, cheering and laughing at Obama's hip hop moves. While much of America might have missed the subtle move, many voters in the audience immediately recognized the nearly invisible wink, a wink which said, "I'm one of you."

Meanwhile, during the course of the campaign, Obama garnered endorsements not just from prominent African Americans like Colin Powell, but also from pop culture's African American hip hop icons, including the aforementioned Jay-Z, as well as Mos Def, Russell Simmons, Common, Ludacris, Snoop Dog, Ice Cube, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy, and Nas. Perhaps endorsements like Powell's reached one type of voter, while endorsements like Jay-Z's reached another: voters who were young, often part of the ethnic minority, and hungry to play a part in the political system.

Rapper-producer will.i.am created two viral music videos promoting Obama's presidential ambitions on YouTube. In the video "We Are The Ones", he features voters of different nationalities, different ethnicities, and different genders. It might be worthy to note, however, that the common characteristic of these voters is their age: judging by their looks, all of the voters are under the age of forty. Together with "Yes We Can," a video which turns Obama's speeches into song, the two videos garnered over eight million views.

And a New York City rapper, Jin, wrote a song called "Open Letter 2 Obama", which the Obama campaign turned into a ring tone distributed through its website.

During an interview with National Public Radio, Duke University's Mark Anthony Neal suggested the rappers' interest in Obama represented more than African American artists supporting "one of their own"; on the contrary, Neal suggests the rappers reveal a new interest in the political system in general, not just interest in one candidate. He points out that "for a figure like [Young Jeezy] to come in from the cold and go into a voter booth and decide, 'This is going to be the first time that I'm going to cast a vote' - I think it speaks volumes to where the larger community is in terms of these kinds of marginalized figures, who've never been involved in the process" (Source: NPR.org)

Did all these musical endorsements make a difference in the end? It's hard to answer how much impact African American hip hop artists had in bringing more blacks to the polls, but the facts do support this: in the 2008 presidential election, African American voters made up a full 13% of the vote - meaning they were a larger part of the electorate than they have been in the last eight presidential elections (by the way, that means since 1980). And Obama won 96% of these votes. While this result is probably not surprising, what is interesting is that "Obama's [victory] margin with [young voters] is substantially greater than any previous Democratic nominee. In fact, no candidate has won any of the standard exit poll age groups by as big a margin as Obama won the 18-29 vote in this election" (Source: Pollster.com).

The influence of hip hop artists might have been a part of this record gain, as not all hip hop listeners are African American, but regardless of ethnicity, listeners are almost always a part of the younger generation of Americans. That is to say, while Barack Obama can claim having Jay-Z and Ludacris on his iPod, it seems extremely unlikely that the 71 year-old McCain could have made the same claim. Just as the saxophone-playing, Vietnam-protesting Bill Clinton marked a hand-over of power to a new generation of Americans in 1992, so it also seems that the Jay-Z listening Barack Obama's election marks a similar sea change.