Can't fight this power (Hip-Hop)

Today's youth movement?

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Hip-hop organizations such as the National Political Hip Hop Convention started large-scale voter registration drives in 2004, and thousands of young men and women donned Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' "Vote or Die" shirts while voting for the first time.

Russell Simmons' Hip Hop Summit Action Network mobilized 100,000 students, teachers, parents and hip-hop stars in a successful fight to repeal a proposed budget cut to New York City schools. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the protest helped change his mind on the issue (and presumably helped persuade him to seek Simmons' endorsement in his reelection campaign). Simmons' group also registered 2 million young people to vote and estimates that 1.3 million of them voted.

Think these efforts are just marketing schemes? The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, an organization that follows voting trends, reported that in the 2004 elections "youth turnout increased substantially, and much of this increase was driven by an increase in voting among African American youth." A similar voting bloc helped reelect Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit — the nation's first "hip-hop mayor."

But hip-hop's greater potential comes from its technology-fueled border-hopping power, with the Internet and iPods plugging the beat straight into the minds of U.S. military personnel in Baghdad and militant young Muslims alike. Globally, hip-hop merchandising, by one industry estimate, seduces $10 billion from an estimated 45 million consumers ages 13 to 34. Listeners have an annual spending power of $1 trillion, according to Forbes magazine. The genre is defining the war in Iraq the way psychedelic rock shaped our memories of the Vietnam War — not only because it has become the music of protest but because it is the language of the soldiers, who make it themselves on simple equipment. Words over a beat.

LA Times

A student did a paper on this topic. Because it was a comparison/contrast paper, he brought in country-western music and the ethos from that genre. He contrasted it with hip hop, where he did not find one supporter for bush's oil war.

I thought it was the most interesting and original paper in the entire class.




Cher

it was the first time I had considered hip-hop as a youth movement of the same sort that we had when I was young (I'm am old fart and would not listen to Rap for anything.) It put the thing in a whole new light, and led me to consider whether I should pay more attention to it, politically speaking, and be less dismissive.

Ask Questions Demand Answers74

http://media.putfile.com/Ask-Questions-Demand-Answers74

:thumbsup:

Thanks for posting that.




Cher