Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Celebrities are trying to make voting cool to a hip-hop generation.
NEW YORK (AP) -- When Sean "P. Diddy" Combs unveiled his get-out-the-vote initiative, it had all the elements of hot album release party.
There was a DJ spinning cool songs. A "street team" of young kids wearing T-shirts promoting the cause. A few supermodels. Even an A-list celebrity face in Democratic strategist James Carville (well, A-list for political world, that is).
P. Diddy is just the latest rap figure this year to try and make voting cool to a hip-hop generation that Combs has dubbed "the forgotten ones."
Russell Simmons brought his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network to the Democratic National Convention in Boston on Monday. About 2,000 people turned out as stars such as Wyclef Jean, Loon, Lloyd Banks and Bone Crusher urged them to register to vote.
The muzzled mouth of OutKast's Andre 3000, who also was present at the Boston event, is adorning new public service ads by the nonpartisan group Declare Yourself, with the motto: "Only You Can Silence Yourself."
And Jadakiss, who raps about drug dealing, violence and other thuggery in his lyrics, is raising political issues in his new song "Why" and giving interviews about voting and getting the minimum wage raised.
"This is the collective conscious of hip-hop at work," said hip-hop mogul Simmons, who over the past three years has enlisted superstars like Jay-Z, Beyonc & eacute;, Eminem, Nelly and Ludacris as his group registered thousands of young black and Latino fans to vote.
"It's a cultural snowball effect. We want people to feel like if you don't vote, you're an idiot," he told The Associated Press.
Different image
The idea of rap stars as political motivators may seem opposite the image projected by many of today's rappers -- a crowd that leans toward sex, violence, partying and the bling-bling lifestyle.
However, James Bernard, who organized the Hip-Hop Political Convention in Newark, N.J., earlier this year, points out rap's long history of political muckraking, from KRS-One and Public Enemy in the mid-1980s to the current group dead prez.
Although rap has been rapped plenty for its raw content, Bernard believes that "hip-hop music is getting more mature. ... I think it's just taken time for this conversation to bubble up."
Jadakiss and P. Diddy acknowledge as much.
Jadakiss says it was time for his music to reflect a larger view of the world: "As an artist, you're supposed to grow. I'm just trying to show maturity and growth as an artist."
Celebrity power
P. Diddy, who says he hasn't voted since the 2000 election, says running the New York City marathon last year while raising funds for charity helped him realize he could do more with his celebrity.
"I think we're growing up, and No. 2, we're starting to recognize our power, and power is responsibility," he told The AP. "We have kids, we're thinking about other things. We want to do other things than making jewelry hot and clothes hot."
"The same way we made a Biggie [Smalls] album hot ...we're going to saturate you with our message," P. Diddy said of his new campaign, Citizen Change, which he launched last week.
Previous efforts
There have been past efforts to get out the hip-hop vote. During the 2000 election, Rap the Vote, an offshoot of the group Rock the Vote, used Mary J. Blige, P. Diddy, Queen Latifah and others to generate voter turnout among black and minority youths.
But Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study for the American Electorate, says those efforts haven't really helped much. Except for a few elections, he said, youth voting has been on a downward spiral.
"People don't vote because of hip-hop artists or rock stars; they vote because they think there's something important to decide," said Gans.
In the 2000 election, about 60 percent of those registered to vote actually did, according to the U.S. Census Bureau figures. However, among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 36.1 percent did.