Hip Hop Politics: How did hip hop feel about the 2016 presidential candidates? (inspired by FiveThirtyEight)
Hip hop has played a major vocal role in politics for decades, with rappers and singers alike mentioning presidential candidates from both sides of the aisle. The genre has only become more political since the 2016 election. For example, Kendrick Lamar used multiple FOX News references in his latest album, DAMN. Eminem’s 2017 album Revival is politically charged as well.
In addition, a lot of lyrics in hip hop pertain to money. This is why Donald Trump has been positively mentioned in multiple hip hop songs for the past thirty years. Rappers looked up to him for being the flashy billionaire who they felt had a Midas touch.
I decided to analyze hip hop and politics because I found a very interesting data set provided by FiveThirtyEight, which was used for Allison McCann’s article: Hip-Hop Is Turning on Donald Trump. While McCann’s article mainly focuses on Donald Trump, I will be using this article to look at other candidates as well as Trump. Note that some of the graphs may appear similar to the ones in the article. However, my graphs have more merged and combined data and are presented differently. This article should be viewed as an addendum to FiveThirtyEight and McCann’s article.
How often did 2016 presidential candidates appear in hip hop songs?
Donald Trump has by far the greatest number of appearances in hip hop songs. Hillary Clinton comes in a distant second with less than half of the number of Trump’s appearances. The other candidates were barely mentioned in hip hop songs.
How did hip hop view Donald Trump?
Hip hop’s love for money and success has brought Trump some excellent publicity. Most of the songs he was mentioned in portrayed him in a positive context. However, the positive mentions are not about Trump’s political agenda, but rather the Trump brand itself. While the majority of Trump’s negative mentions were about politics, none of them were about his hotels or his money. On the other hand, almost all of his positive mentions pertained to money and hotels. The Republican Party does not necessarily gain anything from hip hop talking about Trump. However, the Trump brand greatly benefits from the free publicity.
Donald Trump was viewed very positively in hip hop prior to announcing his candidacy for president. Prior to 2015 there had only been one year (1993) where Donald Trump was portrayed more negatively than positively in hip hip lyrics. At his peak around the first quarter of the 2010 decade, Trump obtained a massive eighteen positive mentions with only four negative mentions.
Prior to 2015, Donald Trump has exclusively been mentioned in hip hop for his money and hotels (or to put it more broadly, his brand). In fact, he had only been mentioned for his political intentions twice, once in 1993 and once in 2009. The lack of political mentions occurred despite his presidential campaign in 2000 and him entertaining a presidential run in 2012. Once Trump announced his successful presidential run for 2016, the mentions of Trump in hip hop became more political.
How did hip hop view Hillary Clinton?
Even though Hillary Clinton is across the political aisle from Donald Trump, she too could not escape the negative opinions of her political agenda from hip hop artists. In more than half of songs that mentioned Secretary Clinton politically, her political career was actually portrayed negatively. Perhaps more surprisingly, not only was Hillary Clinton mentioned more times in a sexual context than President Trump, but she was also portrayed negatively in almost of all of these instances. The only subject where she was viewed more positively than negatively was with money.
Hillary Clinton’s majority of mentions came in 2008, when she ran for president against then-Senator Barack Obama. She was portrayed quite negatively during that year in hip hop. Lyrics such as “Look at Hillary Clinton when she speak, look like the devil with a grin”, “More like Obama versus Hillary, nothing, an intelligent black man against a woman”, and “It’s like we paying them rent to live inside a prison, Hillary Clinton is benefitting from politicians” conveyed not only the hip hop industry’s support for Barack Obama, but it also demonstrated their disdain for his opponent.
When she announced her candidacy in 2015, however, she did not receive a major increase in negative mentions like she did for her previous presidential campaign. Rather, Hillary had begun to be more positively viewed as a future leader for the United States. Hip hop instead turned on a man who was once one of their biggest idols.
How did hip hop view the remaining candidates?
Interestingly enough, despite dropping out early in the Republican primaries, Jeb Bush was mentioned the most out of the remaining candidates. Bush’s amount of mentions is actually because he is a member of the Bush political family, and some of his mentions actually come during the 2000s. The other candidates were only mentioned a maximum of two times, with Bernie Sanders, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee being mentioned twice and Ben Carson and Ted Cruz being mentioned one time each.
How political are hip hop artists?
For the following graphs, I removed any artists who only brought up political candidates once or twice. The graph above shows a variety of artists and how they feel about presidential candidates. Surprisingly, the relatively new rap group Migos has the second most mentions of presidential candidates, two thirds of which are positive and the remaining being neutral. Furthermore, artists who talk about political candidates more also tend to mention them in a positive or neutral light. The majority of negative mentions of presidential candidates come from artists who barely talk about politics (those with one or two mentions of presidential candidates). The sole exception of this statement is Eminem, who prior to mid-2016 has all of his mentions about politicians be negative. This number will change, however, as a result of the release of his politically charged album Revival.
Save for one mention of Chris Christie and two mentions of Jeb Bush, every other political hip hop artist either talked about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Despite being the most popular candidate amongst young voters, none of the “politically active” hip hop artists actually mentioned Bernie Sanders in songs released prior to the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Another interesting note is Kanye West’s mentions of Donald Trump. Despite his brief yet viral endorsement of President Trump after the 2016 presidential election (and despite his candidacy for president in 2020), Kanye West only mentioned Trump in three songs prior to mid-2016.
Not surprisingly, the “politically active” hip hop artists mainly talk about money and hotels. In fact, there was only one artist (Eminem), whose majority of political candidate mentions were in a political context.
Conclusion:
I was not surprised that Donald Trump was mentioned the most out of any other presidential candidate. After all, Trump has been a topic of hip hop songs for thirty years. I was surprised, however, to find that Hillary Clinton also had a lot of negative views in hip hop. Her massive amount of negative mentions was later found to be because of her running against Barack Obama in 2008.
Furthermore, I was a little shocked to find that most artists who mention political candidates three times or more do not often talk about them in a political context. Rather, they talk about their money or their power. However, I feel like with the election of Donald Trump, hip hop is becoming more politically centric. As such, the number of political mentions should increase as well.
