So it’s March already, less than 8 months until the presidential election, and it’s difficult not to notice that hip hop has been left out of Obama’s campaign this time around. Leading up to 2008, he found all kinds of opportunities to associate himself with hip hop, tapping the energy of the music and culture to motivate young people across the U.S. to hit the polls.  I think it’s safe to say his strategy worked–and with the exception of the occasional stupid lyric (think Ludacris’s “Politics: Obama is Here”), there was minimal fallout.  I definitely admired Obama for this–previous presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, generally went out of their way to distance themselves from hip hop.  Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” comes up all the time, even now.  Obama flipped the script on all of that.

But after the election, the love for hip hop seemed to dry up, and now, in 2012, I think it’s fair to say that the Obama campaign is straight-up scared of it.   The president’s playlist, 29 songs long, has plenty of country but not a single rap song.  No way this is accidental.  It’s also not hard to figure out why the campaign is reluctant to go near rap.  When Common, one of the most positive and socially conscious rappers out there, was invited to the White House last May, right wing critics like Sarah Palin and Karl Rove had a field day, cherry picking (and intentionally misinterpreting) lyrics from his Def Jam poem “Letter to the Law.”  All of a sudden Common of all people was branded a violent thug and a would-be cop killer, even though anyone who has listened to Common knows he regularly takes a stand against violence in hip hop.  His track “I Used to Love H.E.R.” became a classic with this very message:

In any case, I decided to email Karl Rove about all of this, thinking (naively) that he might listen to reason.  But he’s a political operative through and through, and hatchet men don’t care about facts.  Here’s my (slightly abridged) email to him and his super-annoying response:

My email: 

I am writing to express displeasure with your recent characterizations of the hip hop artist Common. I am a hip hop scholar with years of experience listening to rap music, and I can say with absolute authority that Common is far from being a “thug.” He is, in fact, one of the most eloquent, positive-minded, peace-loving rappers in the industry today. I am not saying that I agree with every word he has ever uttered, but having listened to a great deal of his music over the years, I have found his messages to be inspiring and frequently critical of the lyrics that many “gangsta” rappers have introduced to the genre. 

His criticism of violence, for example, got him in trouble with Ice Cube, a well-known “gangsta” rap pioneer, and since then other rappers like Jay Z have used Common as an example of the kind of rapper they are NOT. His work is complex and always socially conscious; in fact, some of his songs recently appeared in a Yale UP anthology that was endorsed by the likes of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West. In short, he is a man of genuine intellect and talent, and I think you do him (and, honestly, yourself) a great disservice by lumping him together with the kinds of artists who are more deserving of your vitriol.

Rove’s entire response:  

So you think people who call for killing cops and President Bush and denigrate women are “intelligent” and “talented”?

Not a lot I could do with that…