Rappers Slammin' Bush

And not just in the way Ice Cube would have you believe: dirty and from the side.

Eminem's new single Mosh, and the accompanying video, has been getting a lot of play for making a sharp political critique of President Bush.

Hip hop, political?

Yes, it's true and rappers have been slamming the Bush family for more than a decade. We want to give a shout out to the original Bush Killa, Paris, who's 1993 song of the same name fantasizes about assassinating George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, for reasons that include sending black soldiers to the Gulf War.

Some choice lyrics that still resonate today:

So don't be tellin me to get the non-violent spirit
'cause when I'm violent is the only time that devils hear it...
so get with Ollie 'cause I'm probably fixin' to make you mad
I'm steady waitin' for the day I get to see his ass
And give him two from the barrel of a black guerilla
And that's real from the mothafuckin Bush killa

Tolerance is gettin thinner
'cause I-raq never called me nigger
so what I want to go off and fight a war for
You best believe I got your draft card

The first Bush administration mobilized the rap community's politics, especially on the West Coast and especially in the context of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, in ways scarcely acknowledged at the time and, apparently, forgotten today - most choose to apply only the shallowest of understandings to early 90's gangsta rap.

For his part, Eminem is being energized by the current Bush regime like his forebears were by 41. A central difference, reflecting the way "raptivism" has changed since the early 90s, is that Eminem is pushing for change through the vote, attempting to make rappers and their listeners (and, more broadly, the coalition of young pop-culture voters) a constituency to whom politicians must pay attention. The previous generation of artists like Paris, NWA, Ice Cube, and 2Pac rapped about violence as a way of drawing attention, through controversial lyrics, to their marginalized status and that of the inner city they claimed to represent. As Paris so pointedly states in "Bush Killa," and which is a sentiment reflected by many gangsta rappers around the same time, "when i'm violent is the only time that [white people] hear it." This was the central message of the 1992 insurrection and the legacy of black radicalism in the 1960s and 70s. What Mosh and P. Diddy's Vote or DIE! campaign suggest is that hip hop (and pop music more broadly) is so deeply integrated into American society today (unlike 10 years ago) that it is a viable, and now socially acceptable, base from which to launch interventions into mainstream politics. The results of this pivotal election may be instrumental in proving or disproving this hypothesis. We fervently hope they demonstrate hip hop's return to its political and mature roots, and prove that young urban men and women are voice that must be heeded.

Paris's message, perhaps, got lost in the distortions surrounding the images of violence inherent to gangsta rap. Eminem's more saavy (read: media friendly) message seems to have proven palatable (see articles in Slate, Salon, and The Nation) and I'm glad that the higher culture information outlets are paying attention this time.

| weBling! |