Rap finds real power

Kanye West may have been this year's hottest hip-hop act - earning no fewer than eight Grammy nominations this week - but he also sees himself as a political commentator.

During a national television fundraiser for the victims of Hurricane Katrina he declared: "Bush doesn't care about black people!"

Blunt, certainly. But how you take West's wisdom about the President may say something about how you respond to the notion, increasingly discussed, that hip-hop has become a new mainstream medium for political discourse, activism and change. And that it is a phenomenon not limited to the United States.

Hip-hop - the music genre that first emanated in the Jamaican, Puerto Rican and African-American neighbourhoods of the Bronx in the 1970s, and has since grown into a culture embracing fashion, its own slang and a style of dancing - may have become America's most potent and potentially most disruptive cultural export.

That hip-hop has attained a global reach is beyond much argument. Aimed essentially at a demographic spanning 13 to 34-year-olds, it transcends borders and religions. American soldiers listen to it in Iraq off duty. And so do Iraqi insurgents.

By most recent estimates, global merchandising connected to hip-hop draws about $10 billion ($14.6 billion) a year from consumers, who number about 45 million, says Forbes magazine.

Travel to almost any continent and you will hear the hip-hop sound, see the breakdancing on the streets and the rap fashions in the shops and markets.

And you will hear the words, either from American rap artists or by indigenous artists, such as Clotaire K in the Middle East or Disiz La Peste in France, who rose to prominence with lyrics about decay and despair in the suburbs.

Lacing popular songs with a political message is hardly novel. Listen to West's newest album, Late Registration - a reference to the need to get blacks into the voting booths - and you hear him riff about the black community being "Merrill Lynched". Yet, it is 65 years since Billie Holliday belted out Strange Fruit, a ballad decrying the lynching of blacks.

West takes on some of his peers' fascination with bling - the over-sized, over-priced jewellery that became the vulgar emblem of rap star success - in another of his new tracks, Diamonds from Sierra Leone. Built around Shirley Bassey's Diamonds are Forever, it explores the links between the diamond trade and civil war, child soldiers and political upheaval on the African continent.

Neither is all this entirely new to hip-hop either. In 1989 Public Enemy released the monster hit Fight the Power. "Our freedom of speech is freedom of death," they rapped. "We got to fight the power that be."

Even then, it is sometimes argued, hip-hop was beginning to take the place of reggae and protest music.

Its impact on other countries is not always benign. In the civil war in Sierra Leone rebel army soldiers took to wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Tupac Shakur, the Los Angeles rap star whose fame only grew when he was murdered.

And the intrusion of hip-hop on to the Arab music scene has angered some conservatives.

In the United States, however, political hip-hop has become more than a language of protest and rebellion. Some political scientists are urging politicians to take notice.

As artists such as West, Eminem, Talib Kweli, Common and Nas increasingly infuse their tracks with socio-political rhetoric, progress is being made to harness the energy of hip-hop fans into something like a political movement.

Crispin Sartwell, a teacher of political science at Dickinson College in California, told the Los Angeles Times: "If Thomas Paine or Karl Marx were here today, they might be issuing records rather than pamphlets."

Not everyone agrees. John McWhorter, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, argues that this so-called "conscious" rap, as some have termed it, is just "gangsta rap" in another form.

He says it is "ultimately all about spitting in the eye of the powers that be. But that is precisely what the millions of blacks making the best of themselves in modern American have not done. And contrary to what we are often led to believe, spitting is not serious activism. It's merely attitude".

Yet there are signs that activist hip-hop is beginning to make an impact on the political landscape.

For example, West's outburst did not die in a vacuum. Rather, his assault on Bush was credited with inspiring other artists, including Big Boi of Outkast and Young Jeezy to stage a concert in Atlanta to raise money for all those chased out of New Orleans by Katrina's deluge.

Or take the campaign this summer by Russell Simmons, founder of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), to oppose budget cuts promised for New York City's schools. He harnessed the people-power of about 100,000 students, teachers and parents, as well as a few celebrities.

Its main event was a rally outside City Hall with an appearance by Chuck D, the founding member of Public Enemy. Shortly afterwards, Mayor Michael Bloomberg changed his mind on the issue and admitted that the network mobilisation had been a factor.

The hip-hop network has been joined by two other organisations conceived to build political consciousness among young voters, especially black young voters - the Hip-Hop Caucus and the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.

In 2004, these efforts made a difference, notwithstanding the election result.

Benjamin Chavis, the veteran activist and chief executive officer of HSAN, said the network's activities got 1.3 million people to polling stations on election day, most of them under 30 years old.

If hip-hop shows it can carve new political contours in the US, countries - and regimes - around the world may have to take notice.

It may already be happening. In Senegal in 2000, local rappers were credited with helping to drive President Abdou Diouf from power with their music, and today they continue their political efforts.

- INDEPENDENT