Dr. Loren Kajikawa, “Rapping Republicans: Hip Hop and the Multiracial Right”

In recent years, rapper Eminem has been vocal about his political allegiances. In 2017, just months after Donald Trump took office, Eminem appeared in a BET “Cypher,” a freestyle rap session where emcees show off their skills, and used the entirety of his allotted time to accuse President Trump of being a cowardly racist who represented an immediate threat to the American people. Less than three months ago, Eminem took the stage again, this time at a Detroit rally in support of Kamala Harris. He once again called out Trump as a threat to the country and introduced former president Barack Obama, who began his speech by rapping lyrics from one of Eminem’s most famous songs, “Lose Yourself.” Despite Eminem’s stated support for Democratic candidates and his rejection of Trump, the white rapper also has been claimed by Republican politicians including Marco Rubio and Vivek Ramaswamy. In fact, early in his career, Eminem branded himself as a politically incorrect provocateur who, as the title to one of his first songs put it, “Just Don’t Give a Fuck.” By emphasizing contradictions in whiteness, particularly with respect to class, Eminem’s early commercial recordings, along with his semi-autobiographical 2002 film 8 Mile, cast him as an angry underdog. Thus, despite his recent efforts to position himself firmly in opposition to Donald Trump, much of Eminem’s early work aligns well with the cultural logic of conservative grievance politics. This lecture explores these contradictions and examines how Eminem can be claimed by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Why was Eminem’s music and legacy open to being adopted by both Democrats and Republicans during the 2024 presidential campaign? How do Barack Obama and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom chose to rap the opening lines of “Lose Yourself” at different campaign events, draw on hip hop history to bolster their respective positions? What does Eminem’s relevance twenty-five years after his mainstream debut tell us about hip hop’s political evolution? And, finally, what can hip hop teach us about recent trends in electoral politics that have seen more people of color, especially young men, identifying with the GOP?

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LOREN KAJIKAWA is Associate Professor and Chair of the music program at the George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics. Kajikawa’s writings have appeared in American Music, Black Music Research Journal, ECHO: a music-centered journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Music and Society, among others. His book Sounding Race in Rap Songs (University of California Press, 2015) explores the relationship between rap music’s backing tracks and racial representation. In addition to his publications, Kajikawa is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music (Vol. 12-13) and he currently serves as co-editor of “Tracking Pop,” the University of Michigan Press’s series of books about popular music.

This program is organized by the Department of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance.