I think that the most vibrant musical art form right now, over the last ten to fifteen years, has been hip-hop, and there have been some folks that have kind of dabbled in political statements, but a lot of it has been more cultural than political.
—Barack Obama, “Ask Obama Live: An MTV Interview with the President,” October 26, 2012
On June 7, 1979, President Jimmy Carter designated the month of June to be Black Music Month. In celebration of this event, he invited Chuck Berry to perform at the White House. Following Carter, American presidents continued to issue Black Music Month proclamations and hosted similar programs.
During the first year of his presidency on June 2, 2009, President Obama changed the name of this observance to African-American Music Appreciation Month. In his first proclamation for this commemoration, he held in high esteem a wide variety of black music traditions, including spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and rock and roll. Complicating outworn notions of blackness, he alluded to how blacks had contributed to opera, classical symphony, and choral music. Hip-hop is conspicuously absent from Obama’s first African-American Music Appreciation Month proclamation.
This oversight is thought-provoking considering the widespread support that the man who once had the moniker “The Hip-Hop President” received from hip-hop generationers as a whole and from artists like Jay-Z, Nas, Jeezy, MC Jin, Kidz in the Hall, Common, Talib Kweli, Puff Daddy, and scads of other emcees. In his African-American Music Appreciation Month tributes that followed, he did give shout-outs to “the urban themes of hip-hop,” the “young wordsmiths,” and “the young poet putting his words to a beat.”
While campaigning for his first term, Obama’s references to hip-hop expanded far beyond the aforementioned token nods.58 He routinely disparaged young blacks from turning to hip-hop for salvation. In July 2008, Obama referenced Lil Wayne at a predominantly black town hall meeting in Powder Springs, Georgia. He directed his comments toward members of the millennial hip-hop generation. “You are probably not that good a rapper. Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school,” Obama declared.59
A year later, he reiterated this message during a speech in celebration of the NAACP’s centennial, insisting that young blacks who are socialized by millennial hip-hop should not primarily aspire to be a professional basketball player or rapper like Lil Wayne.60 Obama’s various calculated references to Lil Wayne—a device that he employed to demonstrate to young blacks that he was “down”—led one journalist to write a brief blog that chronicled the relationship between Young Weezy and Obama entitled “Does Obama Love Lil Wayne or What?”61 Perhaps Obama shared a common veneration of King with Wayne, who in his 2007 mix-tape track “Love Me or Hate Me” spit: “I are the illest nigga Martin Luther King died for.”
Obama has haphazardly been called “The Hip-Hop President” by more than a few newshounds. He is by no means a hip-hop head, and it is a stretch to label him a member of the hip-hop generation. He did not begin working with African American communities and intimately interacting with black culture until the late 1970s and the 1980s. He has disclosed that much of his intimate connections to African American culture grew out of his marriage to an African American woman. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners—an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters,” Obama narrated in his “Race Speech.”62 Obama himself has also confessed that he was not socialized during his younger formative years by “old school” hip-hop, but by black music from the 1970s. Though familiar with some of the popular hip-hop artists by way of his daughters and younger aides, he has said that he listens most to Stevie Wonder; Marvin Gaye; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and the Temptations.
To the great dismay and chagrin of Donald Trump and his many co-conspirators in the half-baked “birther movement,” in 2011 Obama released an official copy of his birth certificate, once and for all proving that he is a natural-born citizen of the United States and, therefore, eligible to serve as the President of the nation.
Several months before his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders left Washington, DC, on a courageous quest to challenge the nonenforcement of the desegregation of public buses in the South. Obama belongs to a generation of African Americans who were not old enough to have been active in the classic phase of the civil rights struggle or even the heyday of the Black Power era. Nearing age sixty, he is also too old to be considered part of the hip-hop generation as delineated by journalist Bakari Kitwana—who, in 2002, identified “the birth years 1965–1984 as the age group of the hip-hop generation.”63 Situating Obama within a conventional generation in American culture is perhaps easier than placing him within a distinct African American generation. He belongs to the earliest cohort of Generation X (Gen X) and can also be considered a late “baby boomer.”
Obama has directly spoken about hip-hop on several occasions. In a brief interview with BET’s Jeff Johnson in early 2008 that has received roughly one million views on YouTube and has been sampled by more than a few deejays, Obama conveyed his stance toward hip-hop after he was asked a straightforward question: “Do you like hip hop?”64 He promptly answered, “Of course.” When he was asked which artists he admired, he responded that he had been listening to Jay-Z’s popular tenth solo album, American Gangster (2007); that he appreciated it because it “tells a story.” He also remarked that he was fond of Kanye, who he would later call a “jackass” for his shenanigans at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards show. Obama qualified his veneration of modish hip-hop by insisting that he was “still an old-school guy.” “Honestly,” he said, “I love the art of hip hop, I don’t always love the message of hip hop.” Without specificity, he then criticized Jay-Z and Kanye for sometimes denigrating women, using “the n-word,” and being preoccupied with making money and materialism. This mainstream and often elicited critique of hip-hop is something that Obama would continue to summon up.
On July 28, 2008, Christopher Brian Bridges (aka Ludacris) released his mixtape, The Preview, produced by DJ Drama. On the track “Politics as Usual,” Ludacris leveled insults toward Hilary Clinton, George Bush, Jesse Jackson, and John McCain. A spokesperson for the Obama campaign quickly issued a statement condemning this “dis” track. “As Barack Obama has said many, many times in the past, rap lyrics today too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism, and degrading images that he doesn’t want his daughters or any children exposed to.” The Obama campaign spokesperson politicked:
This song is not only outrageously offensive to Mrs. Clinton, Rev. Jackson, Mr. McCain and President Bush, it is offensive to all of us who are trying to raise our children with the values we hold dear. While Ludacris is a talented individual he should be ashamed of these lyrics.65
This was situational politics in its purest form; Obama welcomed Ludacris into the White House in 2009 and 2015.
In his interview with BET in 2008, Obama pointed out that hip-hop could be effectively used to help educate African American youth. He remarked that hip-hop had the potential to help the youth think more critically; he labeled hip-hop “smart” and “insightful” and conceded that emcees can deliver, in his words, “a complex message in a very short space.” He also urged artists to move beyond hip-hop’s essence of “keepin’ it real” and chronicling the realities of everyday life in urban America. Instead, he appealed for emcees to awaken the possibilities of a brighter future and “change.” They should, he concluded, embrace his mantra, “the audacity of hope.”
Several years after his interview with BET, on October 14, 2010, Rolling Stone magazine featured an absorbing interview with Obama. In response to the questions, “What music have you been listening to lately? What have you discovered, what speaks to you these days?” Obama rejoined:
My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There’s still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the