In past years, many campaigns to get young voters out and voting such as MTV's rock the vote have been marginally successful but really failed to mobilize as many people as they'd have liked to using the "it's hip to vote" angle. Remakes of "What's Going On" and "Wake Up Everybody" by modern top 40 artists still rang in as trite and dated. There was already such a distance between the 18-21 year olds and the original versions of those songs that the the inspiration the new versions were attempting to borrow from failed to come across to the newer generations. However, it really caught my attention the other day to hear Cuban rapper Pitbull on a bootleg remix of America's #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 ("Low" by Flo Rida f/ T-Pain) saying "Me, I'm Diddy, Jay-Z, and a little bit of Biggie, gimme the Louis and I'll be out, what'chu think boy? Forget a debate, boy, they're feeling me like Obama and Hilary...."
The three conclusions that this causes me to draw on really makes me think that a more 'organic' (or 'bootleg') approach will be a more successful one if we're really going to try to mobilize youth culture using music. (1) Pitbull is trying to establish himself as an important figure by drawing comparisons between himself and hip-hop moguls/icons Diddy, Jay-Z and Notorious B.I.G., and, in the same breath, says "They're feeling me like Obama and Hilary." This puts Obama and Hilary on the same level of importance (to the hip-hop audience) as several respected icons of the industry, thereby saying "Obama and Hilary are important to the hip-hop community, too." (2) Pitbull's rapping usually comes from a place that stands for the underdog and he is one of the few major Latino rappers in the game right now, so his endorsement via name-dropping of the Democratic candidates puts them in the minds of his intended audience which largely includes an urban Latino population. (3) The idea that these two figures are considered culturally relevant enough to be immortalized in song before they're even presidential candidates shows how significant this year's primaries are. He would not have included them in his lyrics if he did not think that people would still remember BOTH of them after the primaries next month.
This wasn't a political anthem and it's not a song about rocking the vote. He wasn't paid to mention them. I think there's a hip factor that Obama and Clinton possess that make them a believable part of a rap song, something that wouldn't feel as organic as name dropping a stuffy, old, rich, white heterosexual male senator from a red state.
