Dead Prez performing in London

Alexander Billet reviews Pulse of the People, a new album from Dead Prez.

BY NOW, we’ve all heard ad nauseam that President Obama is a “fan” of hip-hop. He has Jay-Z on his iPod, he loves its “entrepreneurial spirit” and he’s still famously referred to as “the first hip-hop president.”

But if anything can be taken from Obama’s recent address to the NAACP, it’s that his understanding of hip-hop is, shall we say, a bit different from most people’s. Rehashing the tired rhetoric from his campaign, he claimed that there were now “no excuses” for Blacks not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

And though he said nary a word about the Supreme Court decision ruling against affirmative action for Black firefighters in Connecticut, he went out of his way to say, “Our kids can’t all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne…I want them aspiring to be president of the United States of America.”

It’s safe to say that Obama doesn’t have Dead Prez on his iPod. If he did, he might hear this:

He go to school just to battle MCs in the cafeteria
Fellas sleep in third period to the theory that
The president is Black
So he should try to be that
Better yet put a gat on your back
And go to Iraq

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