A hip-hop voting bloc

Politicians turn to music mogul Russell Simmons to harness the power of the youth movement.

NEW YORK - The phone in the 43rd-floor Manhattan office of hip-hop magnate Russell Simmons won't stop ringing.

Rapper Wyclef Jean wants Simmons to hear a new song. Novelist and cultural critic Nelson George talks in a blase tone about the release party Sean "P. Diddy" Combs is throwing later for Bad Boys II: The Soundtrack.

Then comes a caller most people would hardly expect to be dialing up hip-hop's head man. It's Gov. George Pataki. The Republican wants Simmons to support his proposal for reforming the state's 30-year-old drug laws, an issue dear to many rap devotees.

Simmons, 45, built a multimillion-dollar, hip-hop-infused empire over two decades that has included a star-studded record label, fashion lines, television shows and films and a Tony award-winning Broadway production. He just put out an energy drink for the fatigued and a prepaid debit card for the credit-challenged.

Between all that, he had an epiphany, spurred in part by practicing yoga, in part by entering his 40s. Simmons, who had constructed a luxurious world in which he chased women, partied hard and used drugs, began beefing up the philanthropic arm of his company, Rush Communications. The chairman and CEO also started muscling his way into the ring of social and political activism.

The man who has profoundly influenced the way young people think, dress and talk as well as the music they listen to hopes to stir them, and more rappers, to take on issues such as public education funding, drug law reform and voting. The godfather of hip-hop, as some call him, wants his charges to give such issues the kind of careful thought they devote to the latest music and fashions.

"We have to get all those apathetic people to pay attention to the social and political landscape of this country," says Simmons, who is now drug free and a vegan.

"I think as rappers, Puffy and Jay-Z's voices are more powerful than George Bush, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and (Donald) Rumsfeld put together for young people across the world. They can bring issues to the forefront like nobody else. They're a very powerful group, and we want to organize that power."

Perhaps Pataki and other leading politicians can't translate a rap lyric like Fo' sheezy my neezy keep my arms so freezy, but they know the man in the baseball cap, oversized preppy shirt and sneakers.

"I think he qualifies as someone to watch, no doubt," Democratic National Committee spokesman Tony Welch said. "He can draw a crowd and he's passionate about politics.

"You've got this potential for a dominant voting force, but it's got to turn out in order to command respect," Welch said, adding that less than 9 percent of eligible voters 18 to 25 cast ballots in 2002. "I think people like Russell Simmons can tap into that and make that real. It's got to be cool to care and think about issues. Already he has made it cool. With more and more political involvement, he's going to gain more and more influence."

"I just need two minutes of your time," Wyclef, holding a CD, tells Simmons. The rapper has just walked into the plush office with its plum view of Manhattan: the Empire State Building, car-clogged Seventh Avenue, the Hudson River and a skyline short two towers.

Wyclef, perhaps best known for his work with the socially conscious rap trio the Fugees, wants Simmons to add cachet to the video for his new single by making an appearance.

After Simmons offers cans of Def Con 3, his new drink, the song fills the room. Over a reggae-tinged beat, the Haitian-born Wyclef raps about gunshots going off, homicides and mothers crying.

Y'all can't blame it on hip-hop, the chorus ends.

"That's hot," Simmons offers.

Simmons has been gauging what's hot in street culture and packaging it for purchase for more than two decades.

The streets have fascinated Simmons since he was a kid growing up in a "neat little home" in a working-class section of Queens. The middle son of Howard University graduates, he ran with a gang, sold weed and fake cocaine, and used LSD.

"There's an energy and creativity in the ways people from the street move, talk, think and react to situations I never get tired of," Simmons wrote in Life+ and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money+ God, the 2001 autobiography he co-wrote with Nelson George. "To me the coolest stuff about American culture - be it language, dress, attitude - comes from the underclass. Always has and, I believe, always will."

Simmons eventually enrolled in the City College of New York, where he studied sociology. But a few credits shy of graduation, a new, emerging culture lured him from the classroom, according to Life+ and Def. He dropped out to promote shows featuring DJs who mixed and scratched on turntables while early charismatic MCs like Kurtis Blow and Grand Master Flash rhymed over the music.

Later, he managed and produced artists such as Run-D.M.C. (his younger brother Joey was a member) and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (now better known as actor Will Smith). Simmons then co-founded Def Jam Records, where venerable acts such as L.L. Cool J, the Beastie Boys and the revolutionary rap group Public Enemy recorded.

As hip-hop grew to dominate youth culture, infiltrating Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Hollywood, Simmons expanded too. He launched the Phat Farm clothing lines; Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry on HBO; and coproduced The Nutty Professor starring Eddie Murphy. In June, Def Poetry on Broadway won a Tony for Best Theatrical Event.

Simmons, who has been spotted at Tampa Bay Buccaneers games with Jay-Z, sold his share of Def Jam but remains chairman. A man with accumulated millions and lots of influence, he has had face time with nearly all of the contenders for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. He and his wife, former model Kimora Lee, have hosted political fundraisers, including a $1,000-per-plate soiree at their Manhattan apartment for Hillary Clinton's successful Senate run.

Few in the rap game are as well-positioned as Simmons to ignite the sort of social, political and economic change he envisions. Conrad Tillard, a former Nation of Islam minister who styled himself as hip-hop's minister, attempted the very thing Simmons is trying when he created Movement for CHHANGE (Conscious Hip-Hop Activism Necessary for Global Empowerment) in the late 1990s. He accused Simmons of promoting degrading images of blacks through rap, a genre some have accused of being violent, misogynistic and materialistic. But Tillard's movement fizzled.

Although Simmons has yet to show large-scale tangible results, he's making substantial strides in fostering the first national conversation about politicizing the so-called hip-hop generation, said Bakari Kitwana, who wrote The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture.

"The conversation is getting more exposure due to hip-hop's economic success," said Kitwana, formerly the editor of Source magazine, which chronicles rap and hip-hop culture. "Rap artists are regularly posting multiplatinum sales and reaching hundreds of thousands of kids within the first week's release of some albums.

"If these numbers could ever be organized into a constituency, mainstream politics as we know it would change overnight. Mainstream politicians as well as old-guard civil rights leaders realize this, which is why they no longer ignore Russell Simmons."

In 2001, Simmons co-founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network with Ben Chavis, who in 1994 was fired as executive director of the NAACP. He had used $300,000 of the organization's money to settle sexual harassment and discrimination allegations against him. But Chavis had rankled the board of directors before it fired him when he reached outside the mainstream to the Nation of Islam, gang members and rappers.

"He fought the NAACP when he used Run-D.M.C. to register voters," says Simmons. "They didn't like the idea, he did.

"I got the smartest adviser I think I could find in Ben Chavis."

The nonprofit network is a coalition of rappers, music executives, old-guard civil rights leaders, and grass-roots activists. Using boldface names like Eminem and Nas to draw thousands of young people to talk issues, the group has held nearly a dozen summits around the country, including Miami.

In April the network announced Hip-Hop Team Vote, an initiative to get 20-million hip-hop heads registered within five years at summits and on the Web. At the Philadelphia summit this month, some 10,000 registered, organizers said. To get into the event, which featured rap performances, summitgoers first had to present a voter registration card or register on site.

Simmons has pointed out that many, if not most, hip-hop heads are not black or Latino.

"Kids in trailer parks and kids in projects realize the common thread of poverty," Simmons said on the Charlie Rose Show in July. "It's about giving everybody who's locked out an opportunity to get in. If I'm trying to affect the lives of those people locked out, it's a lot of people, not only African-Americans."

Mobilizing those people as a political force "definitely would be a tall order," said David Bositis, senior political analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. Increasingly, Bositis added, younger African-Americans, concerned about police brutality and securing living-wage jobs, feel disaffection and identify less with both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Darryl Lee and Allen Gay, both 18, of St. Petersburg, may not know party leaders, but they know hip-hop's leading man.

They knew nothing of Simmons, the budding activist, however. Lee and Gay initially were suspicious.

"He's been a millionaire for 20 years and he's just now deciding to do something?" said Allen, a rapper working on his GED. "If he really wanted to help the community, why is he just now trying to do it? First he's selling clothes. Now he wants us to vote."

"But there's nothing wrong with trying to make the community better," Gay, a budding poet, added.

Whatever the reasons, both agreed it was time for someone to step up and give voice to issues that resonate with them and their peers. Politicians they see are failing to speak on police harassment, raising the minimum wage and preventing repeats of disturbances, such as those in 1996 in St. Petersburg.

"It's time for someone who really wants to see those things change to step up," said Allen, a registered voter.

Katisha McKinnon, 15, a Gibbs High School sophomore, believes Simmons will mobilize many "because he's Russell Simmons."

"He started a lot of stuff, so he's got to be doing something right. If he says the right things, some people will listen."

This month, in a full-page ad in the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., Simmons called for a boycott of KFC. He called on the fast-food restaurant's owner to improve practices of raising and slaughtering chickens.

Last year, Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network spoke out against the pending deportation of Bradenton jail inmate Ricky Martin Lloyd Walters, the English, eye-patch-wearing rapper better known as Slick Rick. Walters, who recorded on Def Jam, has been in jail since July 2002 and faces deportation because of a 1990 conviction for attempted murder. Supporters of Walters, who has lived in the United States since he was 11 and served his sentence, say he is a victim of the government's misguided war on terror.

In another issue last year, Simmons enlisted marquee names including Wyclef, Public Enemy founder Chuck D. and Doug E. Fresh to protest New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to cut $358-million from the public schools. Thousands of teenagers showed up, choking the streets near City Hall.

But some complained the rally evoked a rap concert. Some youth seemed interested only in seeing the stars up close, said activist Charles Barron, who was elected to the City Council in 2001.

"I'm glad to see (Simmons) and hip-hop out there," Barron said. "Hip-hop is a powerful force. But he needs to do some serious political education and organization of the youth."

Barron, now in his third decade of activism, has been a Black Panther and has worked with others for the repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws. Put in place by then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, the laws require long mandatory sentences for first-time low-level drug offenders.

The proposal Gov. Pataki put forth recently, the one he's discussing on this day with Simmons, followed a seven-hour spring meeting with Simmons and other key political players. Activists who have been working on the issue for decades were shut out, Barron said.

Barron and others say Simmons' handling of the issue underscored his naivete in the political realm. The New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying is looking into whether Simmons and other reform advocates broke state laws by not registering as lobbyists. Simmons filed a complaint in federal court, charging that the commission is unfairly targeting him because of his outspokenness on the issue.

Pataki's proposal, which calls for making some inmates eligible for release or resentencing but not for repeal of the laws, disappointed Barron and others.

"We weren't talking about reforms; we were talking about repeal," Barron said of the plan, which New York's legislature has yet to take up. "If (Simmons) had had different people at that table, the results would have been different.

"The movement needs to be broader and more collective and (Simmons) needs to surround himself with people who are more committed to black and Latino people than he has surrounded himself with."

Simmons, whose older brother as well as his longtime driver and friend served time under the Roc laws, is very aware of the criticism. He would love to see mandatory minimums gone. At the moment, it's unrealistic, he says. There has to be compromise.

Still sitting behind his desk, initially he says of critics: "I don't give a f---, man. I'm a businessman. I'm not running for office. They can't hurt me with their criticism too much. I don't care about the criticism too much."

Then, moments later, he softens, but only a bit. "I don't want to fight my critics. . . . I do want to listen to them closely and see if I can learn something from their criticism."

On this day in Simmons' busy office, Pataki's staff sends a copy of the proposal, which Simmons says no one else has seen. Not the state's U.S. senators, or leaders from the NAACP and the Urban League. All were part of the reform effort, he says.

"And you know what?" Simmons says. "They sent it to me . . . not because of me, but because of rap and its power to reach people.

"There's a movement toward greater consciousness in hip-hop. We'll see what we can do to push it forward."

- Marcus Franklin can be reached at mfranklin@sptimes.com or 727 893-8488.

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