Rap Activism, Or Not: Young Jeezy on NPR

Continuing to track the election postmortems on what hip-hop did or didn’t do in terms of swinging the vote Obama’s way. This now ancient November 9th NPR Weekend Edition pairs Young Jeezy with Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal, and draws the parallel between rapper double consciousness—the “Snoop Dogg that sells records” vs. the “Snoop Dogg that’s sitting with Larry King talking about the election”—and Obama’s own wink-and-disavowing nod at the rap community. They even get Jeezy to sort of admit to breaking character:

Anybody that listen to my music and know where I come from and know what I been through, and just to hear me take a pause from all the normal rapper stuff and just sit back and go, ‘You know what, we got a problem and we got to address this.’ If you’re out here, [a] hard-working American, and you can’t even put food on your table, there’s a problem with your system.

Would still love to see some numbers as to whether or not the Jeezys of the world actually moved voters one way or another—anyone? I guess the question now is whether rap stays involved for the next four years. Right now there’s still some, uh, cognitive dissonance.