DONALD TRUMP RAP VERSION
Hip hop & celebrity bubble plus two new Follow the Sound videos
A few blocks away from each other in Greenwich Village were two long running and once essential music venues, I profiled in two new Follow the Sound YouTube videos. If you’re a follower here, you should subscribe to my Nelson George You Tube channel where so far five episodes are in the Follow the Sound playlist with many more to come.
Now to Donald Trump, hip-hop and black men.
There's been much conversation about whether Black men are going to vote for Trump or what percentage of Black men were going to vote for Trump. So I went back to look at his history with black folks, through the prism of hip hop, since we can loosely quantify how often he was referenced in songs as a way to gauge his impact. If you go back to the golden era of Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs and his 1990s and 2000’s white parties in the Hamptons, Trump was a regular attendee. He was very much connected to Puff and to his celebrity circle (which oddly included director Penny Marshall for a time) and was regularly name checked in rap records. According to a survey I found on line, between 1989 and 2014, 60% of the references to Trump were positive and only 19% negative. I can't absolutely vouch for the accuracy of those numbers, but they seems right.
Another survey reported that: between 2008 and 2015, Rick Ross mentioned Trump nine times; between 1996 and 2016, Nas mentioned Trump seven times; between 2013 and 2016 the Migos mentioned Donald Trump six times; between 2013 and 2015 Yung Thug mentioned Trump four times; between 2000 and 2012 Lil Wayne mentioned the former President five times. Trump references in pop culture actually go back to the ‘90s. The first I remember was a song by The Time on their ‘Pandemonium’ album titled “Donald Trump Black Version.” On it lead singer Morris Day attempts to charm a woman by telling he he would treat her like Donald Trump — if he had Donald Trump’s money. So that's 1990. And that's not hip hop. That's from a completely different genre. Mac Miller even did a record with Trump's name in the title. So, as a businessman, he’s been in the pop culture mix a long time as a symbol of money and success well before he ended up as TV host, much less President.
But the much of his visibility as a cultural figure in the black community comes from hip hop. Let's be frank, if his name wasn’t easy to rhyme, I'm not sure he’s mentioned so often. I looked at a bunch of rhymes about Trump from a different artists and “chump,” “hump,” and “lump” all go well with Trump. A lot of rappers also squeezed Trump into rhyming “trunk,” “spunk,” and “crunk.” “Chump change” becomes “Trump change.” One of my all time favorite rap records is Raekwon's “Incarcerated Scar Faces” and it features a positive reference to Trump in that record: “But yo, Guess who's the black Trump?”
So the attitude from a lot of MCs, which were primarily black men during this time, was that Trump was an admirable figure. But that's because, in the ‘90s, Trump was in the same celebrity circles in New York as Naomi Campbell, Robert De Niro, and many of the pillars of the hip hop business. He associated with them and would pass along business advise. His number one piece of wisdom was: “Put your name on everything.” The Trump aesthetic was put his name in big letters in front of hotels, golf courses, casinos, anything to got his hands on. He understood the power of branding before that phrase was widely used. That's a vision of self-empowerment that hip hop, a space where acts had a big logos, and wore jewelry that said their name or their label's name.
So the branding mentality of Trump aligned itself well with a lot of hip hop’s values as the culture began its ascendancy. Similarly, if you watch Trump during presidential debates or any forum where he's speaking against opponents, the man has a rap battle attitude. He names his opponents, calls them “Low Energy” or “Sleepy Joe.” All of this name calling, not dissimilar to Muhammad Ali versus rival boxers, serves to minimize them through dismissive nicknames. So I always thought one of the things that Trump took from hip hop (and wrestling), was a sense of bravado, sense of overstatement, and cartoonish machismo.
Trump famously took out a full page ad in the New York Times urging the death sentence for the five young black men falsely accused of a rape of a white woman in Central Park. In the same era he made a big deal out of supporting Mike Tyson with money and a residence post his rape conviction in Indiana. So Trump was engaged with Black celebrity culture, but dismissive of working class Black folks. Even before the right wing MAGA black congresspeople who support him now, Trump always had a small black constituency, mostly among either moneyed or aspirational black men, who identified with him.
Now, an interesting sidebar to this, Trump had a mixed race girlfriend. She was half white, half black, and modeled in New York. I'm not going to use her name but she was between his current wife and Marlon Maples. I believe one of the reasons he didn't marry her, quite honestly, was because she was mixed. People in New York knew about the relationship, but the mainstream media is either clueless about it or decided not to report on it. But, when you consider his many racists comments about African-American, it seems like something worth exploring.
The hip hop tide against Trump in terms once he began running his xenophobic, racist campaign for president in 2015. But there is also still a grudging sense of admiration on the part of many in the culture. A lot of these guys have had a relationship with Trump of some kind. But that relationship is based on life in the celebrity bubble. It’s ultimately not about color — its rich men supporting rich men.
Now are working class black men going to vote for Trump? In big numbers? I don't think so. I think there will be people who go, “Oh, you know, I like him because he he speaks his mind” or “I like him because he's about making money” or "I'm like him because the Democrats haven't done enough for black people. “
Well, the truth of his administration was there were virtually no black people, with one or two exceptions, who had significant role when he was in the White House. I don't believe he nominated one black judge, even a Clarence Thomas-like puppet, in his entire four years he was president (please feel free to fact check me.) The idea that he's gonna go out of his way to address the plight of poor Black people in any significant way is a joke. Those who think otherwise are deluding themselves.
This narrative that Black admiration for Trump could tip the election is not gonna go away, because it's just good copy. The idea that any black people would publicly support Trump is obviously sexy on Fox News and all those other right wing sites. Those supporters are the Black GOP congressman, who said segregation was good for Black people and that Black families stayed together more during that time. Well, if going outside made you more likely to be lynched, hell yes you stayed close to home.
A question to ask any rapper who’ve expressed kinship with Trump is “What’s your voting record? Do you vote regularly? Are you registered to vote? Did you vote in the last Presidential election? Are you really getting your butt down to the polls in November or are you talking loud to get social media attention?” Now that’s a conversation worth having.