|
Yet the self-aggrandizing, self-important RtV awards
presentations go on, and countless slick media campaigns
with an artsy-skanky Gen-X bent have hit the airwaves
for over a decade with serious-looking rock stars
and actors admonishing young and hip people to vote.
If one reads the “Timeline”
page (linked through the “Action”
page) on the RtV site, it reads like an orgy of celebrity
and media back-slapping.
For 2004, the organization is at it again, with a
multi-million dollar media blitz to galvanize the
youth vote for the election in November. Perhaps you’ve
seen the newly civic-minded Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy
(best known for his one-time relationship with J-Lo
and a nightclub shooting and getaway in which he involved
her back when he called himself Puff Daddy ), wearing
his new ’04 campaign t-shirt with the charming
slogan: Vote or Die.
On the RtV website there are images of many people
of color and many slacker faces of all ethnicities
all over the site — people who look stoned,
people who look dirty, people with not-so-good skin,
and even the ubiquitous Xers staring that blank, smug
Xer stare. But based on the sixteen names of those
listed as RtV’s leadership (not counting assistants)
it doesn’t seem that very many people of color
are running the campaign. The ethnic faces seem like
so much politically-correct window-dressing.
In fact there seems to be a real focus on getting
out the black youth vote this time around, with a
whole page dedicated to Rap the Vote. Yet when one
clicks on the link to the Rap the Vote website, which
promises, “poetry slams meet politics,”
the link is dead, yet the page lists no less than
46 “Advisory Board Members.”
Ethnic faces may be all the rage in selling cool
to the masses, but it defies the statistics that show
youth voting among blacks to be remarkably consistent
over time, with less of a decline than overall youth
voting. Why the focus on black youth voting when they’re
not the problem? Hispanic voting, although underrepresented
has been trending upward among youth voters, as has
Asian and Native American voting among those aged
18-24.
When one looks more closely at P. Diddy’s involvement
on the RtV site, one is directed to his own campaign
called Citizen Change, which states that it, “plans
to make responsibility and activism the new ‘in’
for young people, and young minorities. With a new
line of clothing — which looks like the anti-Urban
Outfitters — that sports lines such as ‘Vote
or Die’ and ‘Gone Voting’ he aims
to get his message on the chests of young men and
women throughout the country.” With Combs’
past success at self-promotion and product sales,
one wonders what he’s really after — votes
or dollars.
The Citizen Change logo features the altered images
of US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving
the Black-Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in
Mexico City — with a Che-looking female added
and one guy turned white (and possibly gay with a
hand-on-the-hip pose). It is yet another example of
Gen-X belittling an iconic image of social import
for short-term gain. Anyone truly interested in what
the Black Power salute meant in those days might read
the short explanation on PBS’s
website.
There are at least 32 pages on the RtV website, including
product and donation pages, all with very little text
lest they overwhelm the short-attention-span Xers
and Gen-Y (or GENexters depending upon what you want
to call the post-Xers). You can buy a black RtV thong
among the 12 products offered — for a mere $14.99,
or a “Give a Sh*t” t-shirt in keeping
with their tradition of low-road and vulgar appeals
to youth as with the RtV "Piss off a Politician"
PSAs the campaign ran in 2000. How daring and subversive.
On the “Donate” page RtV claims to have
helped a “revolution” in its first campaign
season in 1992 — I guess they’re counting
the uptick in all voter groups that year. A real revolution
by RtV would be to make sure that its celebrity spokespeople
actually vote, since flag-draped Madonna failed to
after her RtV commercials in 1990 and Ben Affleck
voted only once the previous decade according to The
Smoking Gun, after admonishing others to vote in the
2000 campaign.
On another page we see that RtV has 29 corporate
partners, 9 of which are record labels or media companies.
I wonder how many of the artists listed as affiliated
with the campaign are signed to those same companies
that give the money? Twenty-four nonprofit partners
are listed, this must be the altruism section, where
people who really give a damn can be found? One wonders.
Once a visitor digs through the entire site a few
worthy sections emerge, namely information and links
to voter registration. But just how dumbed-down are
Gen-X and Gen-Y if they can’t figure out how
to register to vote by themselves? If you enter the
term “voter registration” on Google, the
first return is the website for the Federal Election
Commission with a printable Voter
Registration Form.
Another section on the RtV website lists Community
Street Teams, to register young people to vote at
selected concerts and other places, reaching how many
few thousands of people with its scattershot focus?
The only non-celebrity, non-media, non-voter-registration-related
campaign given prominence on the site (other than
to send money to somebody or buy something or look
at celebrity pictures) was for healthcare, but its
goals are embarrassingly timid: to simply raise the
cutoff on family health insurance plans to age 26
is their goal. There is no discussion of universal
coverage — for an affordable national health
insurance, or for a more progressive single-payer
plan from this organization.
RtV claims that in 1992 it registered 350,000 young
people and help lead over two million new young voters
to the polls and that these young people reversed
a 20-year cycle of declining participation with a
20 percent increase in youth turnout compared to the
previous Presidential election. Statistics show that
RtV likely rode a statistical blip, as overall turnout
was higher among all age groups that year. In 1996,
RtV claimed to register 500,000 new voters, still
short of what it was losing over time.
Rock the Vote describes itself as a “non-profit,
non-partisan organization, founded in 1990 in response
to a wave of attacks on freedom of speech and artistic
expression.” In the 80s Tipper Gore (wife of
Al) and others led the Parents’ Music Resource
Center (PMRC) and successfully lobbied Congress to
pass laws to issue warning labels on music which it
considered to contain excessively vulgar lyrics. There
was also the attacks by president George Herbert Walker
Bush’s administration on the so-called NEA Four,
four artists receiving federal funding for their avant-garde
(or merely tedious and self-absorbed depending upon
your point of view) performance art which the right-wing
Christian conservatives sought to ridicule for political
gain.
Free speech advocates saw these as infringements
upon First Amendment rights, and they had a valid
argument. But given the ensuing years of a flood of
vulgarity, mostly in Hip-Hop music, which debased
women, glorified gangs, violence and drugs for a mostly
white audience buying these records, the labeling
effort seems — in hindsight — downright
quaint.
RtV’s sales pitch continues, “Rock the
Vote engages youth in the political process by incorporating
the entertainment community and youth culture into
its activities. From actors to musicians, comedians
to athletes, Rock the Vote harnesses cutting-edge
trends and pop culture to make political participation
cool.” Ah, here’s the core of the problem,
and why RtV ended up such a failure.
Since when is civic participation cool? The Beats
and Hippies and other social activists of the 50s,
60s and 70s were mostly creating change outside the
system — through direct action, artistic expression
and demonstrations.
There was an intellectual core to the previous decades’
political activism. Our new anti-intellectual and
hollow age — where posing seems and end in itself
— seemed predetermined to manifest an organization
like Rock the Vote, with such limited goals, such
superficial meaning, and with such dismal results.
|
