We hear them every day rolling through suburban and rural America.  Sound systems thumping gritty hard-core inner city raps out through strategically wide-open car windows.  Wannabe kids with Euro-ethnic last names trying hard to make their involuntary listeners believe that they actually live the gansta life and have suffered the urban iniquities being verbalized by the rappers. 

Another wannabe -- Barack Obama -- took pains to publicly proclaim his enjoyment of rap superstar Ludacris' poetic art.  Of course, because he is a well-educated forty-something yuppie, he listens to Ludacris through the earbuds of his iPod. 

Being brought up abroad and in such far-from-the-ghetto states as Kansas and Hawaii and having been nurtured, in part, by an average white grandmother about whom he has revealed "...[she] once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street [and] on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe," Obama has about as much to do with the gangsta life as Joey Roma, Jason Katz or Kevin Kelly idling in front of Wal-Mart with their car stereos cranked to the max.

Obama cringed again yesterday as a result of the latest vile poetry of his friend, Ludacris.  On the candidate's behalf, the Obama Campaign promptly labeled Ludacris as "outrageously offensive" after the poor gangsta had pulled out all the stops in his latest rap in an effort to convince people to elect Obama.

Sure he used the B-word to describe Hillary Clinton, dissed the President by referring to him as a mentally handicapped person and advocated paralysis-over-office-holding for John McCain in the process.  But this is the kind of imagery that genuine rap fans have come to expect from their edgy superstars.  So if the cringer has actually been listening to this genre he has certainly heard harsh words and insensitive characterizations before.  

Additionally, much of today's urban music is chock full of the N-word, the B-word, the H-word and every four-letter word in the book.  By design, therefore, today's rap is neither polite nor politically correct and it is rife with themes that are completely antithetical to the family values and political philosophies being globally professed by our nation's first serious presidential candidate of color.

It is naive to believe that Barak Obama did not realize how anti-socially obscene Ludacris' material can be if, in fact, it has actually been part of the candidate's iPod playlist.  Thankfully, since we have never been exposed to the full wattage of the CD player of Obama's rides, we are forced to accept his word as truth along with all the other "look how Black Barack is" stories that he tells. 

Or was his earlier acknowledgement and praise of Ludacris just a contrived photo-op designed to get the bi-racial candidate some street cred in the actual African-American community?  Was it just another of those made-to-look-spontaneous knuckle banging moments?

It was a stretch for anyone to have believed that Obama never realized -- until the media abundantly exposed those "looped-together" videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright in action -- that his spiritual advisor had been saying some very racist and anti-American things from his pulpit during the twenty-year time frame that coincided with the Obama's church membership.

It is as ludicrous to believe that Barack Obama is a Black candidate for president as it is to believe that every thumping ride has a real gangsta behind the wheel. 

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© Copyright Ed Donath

August 1, 2008

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