Headline : Rappers took the White House. Now what?

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A crowd of White House press looks on as Kanye West and then-President Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office on Oct. 11, 2018. Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images hide caption

A crowd of White House press looks on as Kanye West and then-President Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office on Oct. 11, 2018.

You can learn a lot about rap's relationship to politics from Russell Simmons. Before he was an accused predator in exile, the Def Jam co-founder was a mogul who used savoir-faire to climb into higher strata. He didn't vote until he was 39, but by the late 1990s he'd become a crusader, hosting fundraisers for then-first lady Hillary Clinton and co-founding the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. He argued hip-hop could be an effective tool of civil rights, though his language notably centered a material focus: "It's the difference between 40 acres and a mule and 40 acres and a Bentley," he told The New York Times in 2002. Simmons would ultimately become a bit more issue-conscious than many in the hip-hop set, backing the Occupy movement and endorsing his longtime friend Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 because of the latter's stance on the factory farming lobby, but his efforts also reinforced his own position as a change-maker with powerful friends. In a Bloomberg profile, Randy Credico, co-founder of the nonprofit Mothers of the New York Disappeared, challenged Simmons' intent: "This is about ego for him. If he wanted to do something useful, he could move his Phat Farm line of clothing out of China where they use slave labor and create factories in communities of color." Simmons responded, "Am I not supposed to be competitive like everyone else?"

Simmons is one of many hip-hop figures whose image looms over a new Hulu documentary, Hip-Hop and the White House, directed by the journalist, author and filmmaker Jesse Washington. The entrepreneur's onscreen presence is minimal — he appears briefly in a photograph, and his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network gets a nod — but many of the ideas he helped foster establish the basis of the doc's scattered thesis. The film considers rap's association with presidential politics, how the Reagan administration shaped the genre and how its growing influence has marked the tenure of every president who followed. Charting this timeline at montage speed allows each president to stand in for some larger rap conversation: George H.W. Bush and gangsta rap's tangles with police, Bill Clinton and hip-hop's transition into a commercialized product, George W. Bush and rap's organizer awakening, Barack Obama and the politics of Blackness, Donald Trump as a lightning rod for rap morality. In doing so, the documentary provides a framework through which to reevaluate rap's proximity to hegemony, but it finds itself prisoner to the Simmons ideology — lost between crusader and capitalist.

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