All about the Beat by McWhorter John

Author:McWhorter, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Rallies and Voter Registration

The main presence of HSAN since its founding has been in the form of rallies, where rappers perform and attendees are registered to vote. The official version is that all or at least most of the people registered then go out and vote. However, the evidence so far is that these rallies are not having a significant effect on how many people in the “Hip-Hop Generation” vote. To put it another way, as I write, there has been no election in which there was a new bloc of votes traceable to hip-hop rallies. Yes, over 51 percent of people eighteen to twenty-nine voted in 2004 compared to the 42 percent who had four years before. But then, overall voter turnout was up that year, clearly because of the uniquely contentious issues surrounding the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. A big uptick in the youth vote alone would make sense as possibly due to HSAN—but we haven’t seen it.

Getting out the vote is not just a matter of getting someone who came to see Kanye and Jay-Z to sign his or her name and address on a piece of paper. Getting out the vote requires local organizations settling into communities and holding subsequent events up to and on the day of the vote. Remember the folks getting out the vote for Al Gore in 2000 practically dragging people out of their houses to cast a vote?

That’s how much it takes, dragging people out of their houses. It always has: ethnic white political machines were doing this way back in the 1800s. Most human beings are not political and never have been, and don’t see how their pulling the lever could possibly affect anything. If you are on fire with a cause, you have to work to make people even fake being political for a brief spell. You have to bring out the vote. HSAN, so far, has not gotten to that. Contrary to what many romantically expect, the charisma of rappers’ performances does not translate into actually bringing out the vote. That is: getting out the vote is not that easy. It takes the same grinding, undramatic work that it has always taken.

Rosa Clemente, New York activist, in a nasty tone that I do not see the necessity of, sharply challenged Simmons’s quest to be the leader of hip-hop. Simmons has sincerely tried to do good. However, she did get in an important question: “How many fund-raisers have you held for the numerous grassroots organizations?” The reason it does not occur to Simmons to even familiarize himself with who is actually doing what in the real world is his basic idea, shared by so many people excited about hip-hop being a “movement,” that political change in black America is going to be about celebrities, phat beats, big news, drama. Simmons is one of the world’s best impresarios. Unsurprisingly, he thinks of black America’s future in the terms of a show. But shows, so far, don’t seem to hold out much promise of doing any real good for us.

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