Steven Sherman is a writer who lives in New York.

http://lefteyeonbooks.org/

The politics of rap in a changing America

To the extent that rap substituted for the Black Power movement, it must be judged a failure as a political movement. Marx’s famous aphorism about the first time tragedy, second time farce, is relevant here. While Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Panthers leaders like Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale mixed canniness at exploiting media image with organising on the ground, Public Enemy, or Kanye West, epitomised the former with nary a trace of the latter.