Hip Hop and Hope

You don’t know Tef.

He’s a rapper, but you haven’t seen him on MTV. He works in politics, but you haven’t seen him on CNN. The media has ignored Tef and others like him, but Tef is part of a new generation of activists that may just make the difference in November’s elections.

When he was twelve years old, Kareem Jackson, better known as Teflahn Poetix (“Tef”) started writing rap songs. By the time he was twenty, he began sleeping in the recording studio, spending his days recording albums and his nights competing in hip hop battles all over St. Louis, eventually acquiring a small following.

But earlier this year, Tef found a new project. In March, he drove to a Hip Hop Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. The meeting, which was supposed to bring together rappers from across the country to encourage political consciousness, changed Tef’s priorities.

“I’ve always been somewhat politically oriented,” he says, “but [the Madison summit] inspired me to go hard with it.” After that event, Tef signed up with America Coming Together (ACT), a nonprofit working to elect John Kerry. Along with several musicians he has worked with, Tef has begun to help local groups reach out to African-American voters and to younger voters.

Everywhere you look, St. Louis’s hip hop scene has become politicized. “People always put political stuff in their lyrics,” says Tef. “The difference is that now people are bloodthirsty for that kind of stuff.”

When his friends became involved in politics, Gabe Moskof—a DJ known as Trackstar—resisted at first, saying he would rather focus on his music. But as St. Louis’s hip hop scene became more and more dominated by what Moskof calls “the Bush issue,” even he got dragged in. At the request of two national political groups, he helped promote a St. Louis event called Slam Bush, where hip hop artists rapped at a person in a George Bush mask as if they had actually gotten a chance to challenge the president in verse. The event drew the largest crowds ever seen at its club venue.

Missouri is one of a small group of states that will decide November’s presidential election. One of the biggest variables going into November is voter turnout, especially in St. Louis’s large African-American community. Black voters in Missouri typically vote at roughly half the rate of other voters, but when they vote they overwhelmingly side with Democratic candidates. This means the Democrats have a huge untapped resource that could turn the election. ACT has already shown that Missouri’s African-American population will vote if it is not forgotten. On primary day this year, ACT focused on heavily African-American precincts and more than doubled turnout.

But because of the way politicians have gerrymandered St. Louis’s political boundaries, many African-American areas are divided up so that no one precinct has an African-American majority or plurality. Because groups like ACT have to target precincts, not individual voters, this makes it very difficult to target African-American voters through traditional methods. Young voters, another untapped resource in St. Louis, are even more difficult to find. They frequently don’t have home phones, they are difficult to contact in door-to-door canvasses and they don’t listen to professional campaigners even if they happen to run into one. Activists like Tef don’t have this problem. He doesn’t have to find out which precincts have the most African-Americans or the most young people. When Tef recites political lyrics, his audience comes to him.

Of course, better-known rappers than Tef have been trying to get people to vote for years. Tef doesn’t have the national reach that P. Diddy has, but he is part of the St. Louis community. He has more influence than an outsider, even a celebrity. Tef can exert a peer pressure that P. Diddy can’t touch.

The hip hop community is not a perfect model for organizing. University City, the area that produced Nelly and boasts some of the best hip hop clubs in St. Louis, is one of the most segregated places in the country. Ron Gubitz, a white hip hop fan who teaches at a largely African-American inner-city high school, fears that St. Louis’s hip hop community doesn’t do enough to reach out to people like his students.

When I called Gubitz’ classroom during homeroom, all of his students said they planned to vote when they were old enough and several planned to help out in this election. Even more interesting, the students all said they were planning to get their parents to vote. If a culture of activism is taking hold in St. Louis, it is moving from the young to the old, not the other way around. I can’t say rappers like Tef are the cause of this new culture, but at least that political spirit is not confined to Washington University students or the handful of rappers who spend their days in University City.

Between now and election day, the polls will fluctuate. But they will not measure the work being done by a rapper named Tef and a crew of newly politicized young people in the heart of one of the nation’s largest swing states. The Democrats have a secret weapon this year that could be the difference between victory and defeat. I just hope it works.

Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.