The politics of hip-hop

Some people argue that hip-hop is politically consequential because activists can use the music and the culture that surrounds it to communicate with young people who might otherwise shun politics. There is something to this. For example, in 2004 the superstar P.Diddy fronted a farily successful voter-registration campaign called "Vote or Die." And HSAN once co-sponsored a rally to protest about a proposed $300m cut to the New York City school budget. The cut never happened. That $200m is a tiny slice of what Ne York spends on its schools, and lack of money is far from the mail obstacle to improving them.

Civil-rights activists in the 1960s were inspired by protest songs, but the songs did not drive the movement. Political change requires hard and often tedious work, and the thousands of weary volunteers working for Barack Obama can attest. Incidentally, one might think that Mr. Obama's spectacular rise undermines the argument that a back man can never get a fair shake in America. But Mr. Nkrumah shrugs that even if Mr.Obama is elected president, he will be powerless to implement progressive politics because the corporate power structure will not let him