Black Political Attitudes and Political Rap Music

Many argue that political or message rap no longer exists. Scholars and critics point to rap music as a genre that is completely negative and only diminishes the progress of the Black community by offering and supporting stereotypes of African Americans (Johnson, Jackson and Gatto 1995; Carpentier, Knobloch and Zillman 2003). On the contrary, I argue that all rap music is not the same and that in fact, there is a subgenre in rap music, political rap, that discusses political issues and candidates exclusively. In this article, I proffer a criterion for identifying political rap music to demonstrate a distinction between the subgenres of rap and the prevalence of political rap within mainstream radio. Finally, I examine the lyrical content of political rap for the assertion of Black Nationalist ideology.