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But while Carson's white campaign manager seems perfectly happy to court the black vote through the medium of hip-hop, it doesn't seem the candidate actually respects it all that much. In an April interview with a New York R&B radio station, Carson defined hip-hop as "the aspect of modern society that pretty much dismisses anything that has to do with Jesus Christ" and claimed it was destroying the black community's faith and family values.Aspiring Mogul—the rapper whom the Carson campaign has saddled with their hopes and fears and dreams—is an openly Republican youth minister and "race relations expert" from Savannah, Georgia. The only other song of his I could find, "The Black Republican," is also about how much Aspiring Mogul likes Ben Carson. I'm embedding it below, but only so you can look at its amazing artwork.
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Between unintentionally hilarious lines like "The devil tryna kill me / But I'm pro-life, don't believe in abortion," Aspiring Mogul does manage to hit upon an essential fact about hip-hop, and that's that hip-hop as a genre is fundamentally opposed to the Republican Party.By now, the causes of this relationship are myriad, but it largely begins with Ronald Reagan, who's popularly credited with facilitating the introduction of crack-cocaine to the hood. Think Kanye West's couplet, "How do we stop the Black Panthers? Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer," from the 2005 track "Crack Music." Or when Chuck D of Public Enemy told CNN, "Since Reagan and Bush, there's been nothing but drugs and guns in the black community."As the years have passed and Republicans have increasingly become the de facto party of rich, old white dudes, hip-hop has reacted accordingly and started mocking the shit out of them. Consider Mac Dre's 2004 album Ronald Dregan: Dreganomics, whose cover found the late hyphy pioneer wearing comically mismatched plaid and standing in front of an American flag and a pastoral home. The title track's chorus features Dre rapping in an intentionally refined cadence, "It's only civilized for us to live our lives / Royal, spoiled, the American way! Dreganomics!"Even more referenced than Reagan is Donald Trump, whose name in hip-hop has served as shorthand as the logical conclusion of capitalism as we know it. Raekwon referred to himself as "The black Trump" on "Incarcerated Scarfaces" from his 1995 album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, which found the Wu-Tang MC reimagining himself as a cocaine kingpin. In 1998, Bay Area hero E-40 put it more bluntly in "Trump Change," in which he rapped about having "Trump change, not chump change."
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In the rare instances that hip-hop has intentionally aligned itself with the Republican Party, it's always felt like a bit of an elaborate irony play. Eazy E of N.W.A. once attended a White House luncheon during the first George Bush administration, but according to the group's then-manager Jerry Heller, Eazy only went because it seemed like the most outrageous thing he could have done that day (and even if Eazy had been a card-carrying Republican, he still showed up to the luncheon stoned, according to Heller). In 2005, 50 Cent reportedly said, "I wanna meet George (W.) Bush, just shake his hand and tell him how much of me I see in him." But given that mid-2000s Fiddy relished his status as rap's arch supervillain (not to mention his 2012 endorsement of Barack Obama), he might have meant the remark as an insult.Related: The Noisey Editorial Board Is Proud to Endorse Donald Trump for Prez
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