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Pulse of the People: Political Rap Music and Black Politics. By Bonnette Lakeyta M.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 232 p. $49.95 cloth.
In September 2016 President Donald Trump, in an effort to stoke racial animus and drive conversation away from his administration specifically and from police actions against African Americans in general, sought to direct the ire of his supporters and middle-income white Americans against NFL players who, following the lead of Colin Kaepernick, took a knee during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality. Since Trump’s election, the president has engaged in a number of such actions, including expressing implicit support for white nationalists and supremacists in Charlottesville. At the end of that month, during the BET Hip-hop Awards, Detroit-based MC Eminem responded in a blistering two-minute freestyle that while base, vulgar, and sexist, asked his fans (many of them white) to make a stark decision—either support Donald Trump or him. To date his video has been viewed approximately 2.28 million times.
Although neither hip-hop in general nor rap specifically were created as political vehicles, they have always served as political vehicles. In the mid- to late-eighties east and west coast MCs rhetorically attacked police surveillance and violence, presaging Black Lives Matter activism by decades. In the mid-nineties, as the neoliberal turn began to take hold, we watched MCs increasingly see themselves as entrepreneurs of their own human capital. And in the dawn of the Obama/Trump era we see MCs like Kendrick Lamar eviscerate both men. And as black youth and whites of all ages increased their consumption of rap, anxiety about its effects have led some to castigate it as part of modern-day respectability projects. In the early nineties C. Delores Tucker used criticism of rap effectively to...