They Were Rap Republicans All Along
Some of us were just too privileged to acknowledge it.
Yes, another post about rappers and election season. (You can see the others here, here and here.) I understand if you don’t care to read another one. But things are happening. Universal things. The adage is that if you ignore the lesson the universe is trying to teach you, it’ll just come back tenfold. I think this is happening to many of us, primarily Black men, as a hip-hop collective.
I’ve known deep down for a long time that rappers didn’t care about the people as much as their well-being. A lot of artists have catalogs that are hateful to everything and everyone but themselves, their money, and what they can acquire with it. It’s something Black women and queer people who had no reason to deify these men have been saying. But I guess in my privilege I tried to contextualize it. Lil Wayne, who recently endorsed Trump, is chief among them.
Lil Wayne famously starts off his concerts with, “I’m nothing without you.” It’s Black supporters who in part made these artists rich. In his era, where music aspirants came up through the Chitlin circuit, they had to get through us to get through to the world. And once they got there, they threw us under the bus.
I’m such a fan of his sustained lyrical ability that I tried to cringe through his colorism, misogyny, and homophobia as simply a matter of being conditioned by patriarchy. I tried to ignore his collaborations with abusers like XXXTentacion and Chris Brown. I tried not to harp on the reality of a man with a dark-skinned daughter and mother rhyming, “Beautiful black woman, I bet that b***h look better red.” I even tried to compartmentalize "I don't feel connected to a damn thing that ain't got nothin' to do with me” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
But then he went and solidified all those lyrics by endorsing Trump. It’s my own dumbass fault for being disappointed about something that was so obvious all along. Yeah, there was “Georgia Bush,” but that was an attack at a President who failed his home city of New Orleans. He and his were personally affected. That was an aggrieved diss track. Wayne’s rarely spoken up on any other issue that doesn’t directly affect his world.
He’s so famously “in his own world,” even by his daughter’s admission, that I joked earlier this year that someone should do a show with him where people tell him about 2020 happenings and get his befuddled reaction. But now he’s a part of one of the biggest stories of the year: rich Black people being bolder than ever about throwing their fans under the bus.
Wayne, just like most mainstream, major label-orbit rappers, have mirrored conservatives all along. It’s only been my male privilege and cognitive dissonance that’s kept me from acknowledging it. (Dark skin) women and queer people have been catching so much shit from these rappers that they long knew how to not be disappointed, but I didn’t want to accept it until they allowed themselves to be used as pawns in Trump’s insulting pandering to Black men via the lowest common denominator: rap music.
Mainstream rappers and conservatives are in lockstep when it comes to rampant misogyny, homophobia, “if it ain’t about money it ain’t ‘bout nothin’” ethos, and hate for Black people. I mentioned colorism, but even constant nods to shooting other Black people are a reflection of an environment cultivated by white supremacy. Rappers are rich hurt people hurting people. We don’t view these men like the average GOP snob because they look like us, they’re fashionable, and usually, give good interviews that present well. But they’re psychologically damaging in their own insidious ways. Our acceptance actually gives them more leeway to rhyme about taking our girls and “big body Benzes while the bitch niggas starve” as Rick Ross did on “High Definition.” They’ve always been spilling how they really feel about us on these records. The hatefulness just became so normalized that we stopped second-guessing it.
At this point, I don’t know what to make of it all. Like I say with so many manifestations of white supremacy, there’s no right answer to something that shouldn’t be happening. The only universal truth that can be applied to this situation is for one to follow their gut. If. If one doesn’t want to listen to any of their music again, they’re completely justified in that.
So many of us look at rap music as an escape. But that escape reflects a privileged disregard for the people being thrown under the bus. Too many rappers’ recent actions entrench their music as another corrosive facet of society. There are few instances of pure delight to be had in this country. It’s hard to wake up and be worry-free about your actions. There’s doubt in where the meals we enjoy came from and how they were farmed. There’s doubt about who was exploited to make the shoes and clothes we buy. There’s the realization in the midst of a good game that sports leagues are making their Black workforce perform through a deadly pandemic. And now, make no mistake about it, there’s trepidation in listening to an often hateful genre that you have to navigate a moral minefield to enjoy. Thanks to white supremacy, poison seeps through the air, through the rivers, and sometimes, through the speakers.
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