{"id":30009,"date":"2013-04-01T03:05:30","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T03:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30009"},"modified":"2013-04-01T03:05:30","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T03:05:30","slug":"not-another-remix-how-obama-became-the-first-hip-hop-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30009","title":{"rendered":"Not Another Remix: How Obama Became the First Hip-Hop President"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not Another Remix: How Obama Became the First Hip-Hop President<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Popular Music Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 22, Issue 4, December 2010
\n<\/a>pages 389\u2013415
\nDOI: 10.1111\/j.1533-1598.2010.01252.x<\/a><\/p>\n

Travis L. Gosa<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Social Science at Cornell University
\nCornell University<\/em><\/p>\n

January 20, 2009 marked the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama<\/a>\u00a0as the first African-American president of the United States. Political commentators are busy making sense of Obama\u2019s candidacy and election, but not enough attention has been given to how youth have made sense of Obama. As I show in this article, young people\u2014so-called \u201chip-hoppers\u201d and \u201cmillennials\u201d\u2014used their unique sensibilities, technologies, and music to help define and elect the first black, hip-hop<\/a> president.<\/p>\n

This article examines \u201cObama-Hop,\u201d rap music about Barack Obama, and the 2008 presidential election. Rap songs about election year politics were a highly visible aspect of the election (Hamby; NPR). This study provides the first systematic analysis of the political, racial, and gendered discourse of the Obama-Hop movement. While Obama\u2019s campaign was discussed in the framework of \u201cpost-racialism\u201d (Crowley), this study shows how Obama\u2019s black masculinity became a major source of identification for rappers. The paper explores how Obama was depicted, embraced, and defended from scrutiny in hip-hop. Based on the review of ninety-seven Obama-themed mixtapes<\/a>, I show how music was used in an attempt to energize youth toward voting and embracing Obama\u2019s political messages.<\/p>\n

The exploration necessarily informs the larger debate over hip-hop politics. The \u201chip-hop wars\u201d\u2014as Rose (2008) labels the persistent controversy over rap\u2014are currently being waged over the political relevance of the music. Representing a generational divide over the meaning of political activism (Boyd), there has been resistance to the claim that hip-hop is indeed \u201cpolitical\u201d (Bynoe; McWhorter 2008). Hip-hop academics are increasingly concerned that corporate control and media consolidation are destroying rap\u2019s political significance (Asante; Rose; Powell). This article addresses the debate by considering the political content of digital mixtapes, which are non-commercial compilations of music, news clips, and photos. The proliferation of Obama rap mixes provides evidence that hip-hop continues to be used toward political ends. This paper shows how Obama\u2019s campaign and subsequent victory put in motion a new wave of explicitly political rap, but one that still includes many of the same problematic tropes around race and masculinity…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not Another Remix: How Obama Became the First Hip-Hop President Journal of Popular Music Studies Volume 22, Issue 4, December 2010 pages 389\u2013415 DOI: 10.1111\/j.1533-1598.2010.01252.x Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Social Science at Cornell University Cornell University January 20, 2009 marked the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama\u00a0as the first African-American president of the United […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8413,1196,8,26,20],"tags":[14248,1392,14250,14249],"class_list":["post-30009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-communications","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-journal-of-popular-music-studies","tag-music","tag-travis-gosa","tag-travis-l-gosa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}