Rock Star Politics
You Down Wit' GOP?
by Andy Behrens
Dana Mozie was raised in Philadelphia in a tough neighborhood controlled by gangs. He attended Howard University with Puffy and earned his hip-hop credentials in the late 1980s working with one of rap's most menacing incarnations, NWA, and one of its most sanitized, Kid 'N Play. These days, however, Mozie is a Washington-based political activist.
Nothing surprising in that, right? Russell Simmons is an increasingly powerful political organizer, too. Rap and hip-hop are intrinsically political forms, liberal vocabularies for a million things going wrong in America. They challenge, subvert, threaten, blah-blah-Tupac-blah.
But Dana Mozie isn't the political activist you'd expect. He's a Republican. Mozie describes himself as the party's "ambassador to the hip-hop culture." The position is unofficial, unpaid and largely unrecognized. But within the GOP, the title of Hip Hop Ambassador is also unchallenged.
Tell him the moniker is ridiculous and you'll get a first-person sociopolitical urban narrative. He's volunteered with the Republican National Committee and co-produced a documentary on the impact of urban violence. And he's very likely the only person to have collaborated with both Ed Gillespie and Eazy E.
"Man, touring with NWA was a good lesson in First Amendment rights," he says during a phone interview. "They always did 'Fuck Tha Police' last, and the local police were always there ready to arrest them on obscenity charges. We always left while the song was still playing. They'd arrest the soundman. But it taught me how some people can be so naïve to a message coming out of a culture."
Not exactly standard GOP dogma. Not to worry: Mozie has a Gipper story, too. "I wrote Reagan a letter in '76 when he was the governor of California. It was for a school project. Everybody had a state. He wrote me back, just a form letter or something. I think I got a good grade out of it. And I also learned I had a voice."
"The next big thing that set off politics for me was meeting Kathy Hughes," says Mozie. "She owns Radio One. She gave me a job when I was 16, and eventually gave me an air shift. She led a protest against Washington Post Magazine when, on their inaugural issue, they had a cover that really demonized a rapper, a guy named Just Ice. Half the city must've went down and laid their magazines on the steps at the Post. It was powerful."
Mozie moved from New York to Washington just as the George W. Bush administration was getting settled. "I started working at the inaugural office," he recalls. "I got this call out of nowhere. They were like 'Dana?' I said, 'Huh?' 'We want you to come to the White House.' It was the first Easter event and they were just trying to get a staff together. It was an amazing thing psychologically. It's a whole other world the minute you cross the iron fence. You feel like you're carrying your legacy, your heritage."
Mozie says he finds natural congruence in two ideologies that are, ostensibly, disparate. Attempt to discuss specific GOP policies with him and he'll remind you — fairly — that inclusion in a party doesn't mean agreement on all principles. His Republicanism seems to be based, in part, on opportunism. "Hip-hop is so direct," he says. "Hip-hop will do more for race relations than people who parse words, the lawmakers, the judges, the courts. This generation has said we were born into a fight that we don't want to be a part of. Black kids today are saying it's about equity. The older generation, the King generation, was asking for inclusion. This generation says, 'We're not askin' for nothin'.'
"Public Enemy says 'Fight the Power.' It sells merchandise, it sells records. But it's not a vote. It's money for somebody, not a vote. Yeah, fight the power. But the record stores are like, ching-ching-cha-ching. Nobody says 'I want to vote and become a millionaire.' Nobody says it. They make a demo and become a millionaire."
"Schools are failing in the neighborhoods," says Mozie. "No one has health care, everybody's in jail. This is under the Democratic community leadership. We have to separate the movement from party lines, understand that civil rights doesn't belong to a party. I look at it like a 401(k). You don't put all your money in one thing. We put all our money in the Democrats. Why did we allow them to rob us of equity? Why did they let this happen when they were our caretakers?"
Mozie is critical of black Democratic civic leaders for investing too much in the preservation of their own authority and too little in their constituents, an opinion he says is based on frontline campaign experience. "In 2002, in my neighborhood, I ran for advisory neighborhood commissioner. It was in the redistricted Howard University area. The council member was a Democrat, and they were very mobilized. But I went around to at least 300 homes, knocked on doors, talked to the community. And it was like, these people have middle class values. They want the rats gone, they want their neighbors to quiet down and clean up their yards. I split the precinct, but I lost by one vote."
Naturally, he didn't use campaign methods from the Republican playbook. "I ran on a hip-hop platform. I had posters up, called it 'Entertainment Advocacy.' I basically used my generation's marketing sensibility. I wanted to do it from a cultural point of view and show people that if candidates don't come to your neighborhood, they're not worthy of your vote."
Mozie attended the 39-hour "Justice For Judges" Senate debate in November, which failed to end a Democratic filibuster that blocked several Bush judicial nominees. (A bitter Rick Santorum left with this: "We'll have our opportunity someday, and we'll make sure there's not another liberal judge. Ever.") At the marathon session, Mozie found himself among an array of Republican activists and staffers and yet, in a way, alone.
"The Senate debate, I was there — the only brother, mind you — and the thing about it was that there were a couple of African-American judges up there, and where was the black community...? Nowhere."
Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton has said, "I am convinced the swing vote of 2004 is the hip-hop generation." But the hip-hop constituency that Sharpton is courting is overwhelmingly white. They're primarily consumers, sympathetic to the embedded politics of hip-hop. Russell Simmons has met with all the Democratic presidential candidates, save Wesley Clark, as they pine away for an endorsement from the influential music mogul-cum-politico. Yet few of the more electable Democrats have spoken persuasively and unambiguously about the issues of greatest importance to many African-American leaders: mandatory sentencing laws, drug treatment, the Patriot Act, and the disposition of a certain $87 billion that seems to have been siphoned away from urban American communities. But Mozie is still with the Bush administration and the GOP. He wants to engage a hip-hop culture that he believes is only tenuously Democratic.
"In the black community, usually you just go along. But that's changing." He adds, "Black Republicans, they have college degrees, don't look like these urban kids. If a black person thinks that they have to morph to be a part of something, they'll resist." Thus, he describes himself as outwardly unmorphed. "I've still got my dreads. Well, not my dreads, really, my twists." And if his Republican message fails to resonate with the hip-hop community, he hopes his hip-hop message won't scare the shit out of Republicans.
"I want them to think, when they see a person like me, 'Be not afraid.'"
E-mail Andy Behrens at abehrens53 at hotmail dot com.
More Black Republicans Go Public
By Tonya Harris, Special to AOL BlackVoices
Vicky Swope, 34, just told her mother that she is a Republican. Nevermind the fact that the Indianapolis mother of two has been voting Republican for the past eight years. Swope, who is black, was afraid to share her political affiliation because her mother is “a hard-core Democrat."
Swope, who switched her support to the Republican Party because they are more aligned with her religious beliefs, isn’t the only African American who has found a reason to join the Republican Party. A recent report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, (www.jointcenter.org) found an increase in the number of young blacks identifying with the GOP.
In 1998, 12.6 percent of blacks, age 18-29, identified themselves as Republicans or independents leaning more toward the GOP than the Democratic Party. By 2002, that proportion had increased to 17.2 percent.
The report also found that 30 to 50 percent of young blacks are sympathetic to Republican Party positions such as school vouchers and partial privatization of Social Security.
Republican Adam Hunter, 21, is among that group. Hunter, a Howard University student from New Jersey, founded the HU College Republicans in 2002. So far, the group has about 15 members.
His parents are active Democrats but when he looked at the positions of the two parties, he found himself “agreeing with the Republican Party more” on issues such as school choice and lower taxes.
Hunter may appear to be a stereotypical black Republican, but Dana Mozie of Washington, D.C., is not. In fact, he is probably the only Republican who has also worked with rap groups such as NWA, Public Enemy and Salt N Pepa.
Mozie (http://rockstarpolitics.tripod.com), is in his mid-30s and is known as “the GOP ambassador to hip-hop culture.” The former hip-hop producer works with the Bush administration to make sure the GOP does not have an anti-black agenda.
Mozie believes Democrats have developed ineffective policies that keep young blacks mired in poverty, while Republicans advocate free enterprise. He also believes young blacks are rejecting the liberal notion that government is their savior. “I see the growth in the [Republican] party coming from the hip-hop generation,” he says.
While Mozie works to draw young blacks to the GOP, S. Malik Husser, executive director of the Democratic National Committee’s African-American Leadership Council, aims to attract them to the Democratic Party.
Husser believes the GOP won’t see a huge number of young blacks joining their ranks because Democrats are still viewed as the party that best represents their interests, such as attaining an affordable college education.
“Look at the issues Republicans are dealing with,” Husser said. “Bush gave the majority of tax breaks to the top one percent earners in the country. How many young African-Americans are in the top one percent?” A poll last month from the Pew Research Center found President Bush’s support among blacks was at 12 percent, compared to 73 percent for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry.
But while blacks’ support for Bush increased six percentage points from August, support among blacks for Kerry dropped 10 points. Hunter, from Howard University, said students have approached him at campus events and quietly whispered that they are Republicans or agree with the party’s positions.
As a result, he tends to think there are more young blacks who identify with the GOP and its ideals but haven’t made that public leap of faith yet.
And what does he think will help them make that leap? “The club being around and me putting the group out there,” Hunter said. “We have to let people know it is OK to be a [black] Republican.”
Salt-N-Pepa
Salt-N-Pepa is an American R&B and hip hop group, consisting of Cheryl James and Sandy Denton ("Salt" and "Pepa", respectively), and Deidra "Dee Dee" Roper (DJ Spinderella). They debuted with "The Show Stopper", a response record to Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick's "The Show". It was an underground hit and Salt-N-Pepa signed to Next Plateau. Their debut LP was Hot, Cool & Vicious (1986, which was produced by Salt's then-boyfriend, Hurby Azor, the group's manager, and he received songwriting credit for the album, though this was later disputed. According to AMG it also featured DJ Pamela Green [1], though they do not include her in their list of credits, and neither does the album sleeve.
Hot, Cool & Vicious received little attention until a San Francisco DJ named Cameron Paul created a remix of "Push It" (The b-side to "Tramp"). Mr. Paul's remix of "Push It", rereleased as a single, quickly became a national hit and was nominated for a Grammy, pushing both the single and LP to Platinum album status.
They released A Salt With a Deadly Pepa, which was only a minor hit, though it featured "Shake Your Thang".
Their third original LP, Blacks Magic was a watershed moment for Salt N Pepa. Cheryl James grew tired of being at the beg and mercy of their industry male superiors who were late and no shows at the studio. With no one but Invinvible's Producer Dana "Dum" Mozie at the board in the Studio at the back of Hurby's Queens home, they began production on many singles for the LP that would epitomize the appeal of Salt 'N Pepa. Dana loaded some sample into a SP1200 Drum machine. Salt started tapping out a kik and snare rhythm. Dana added hip hop stabs, voices drops, and breakbeats sounds. Moments later, Salt utters "You know life is all about expressions". "Expression" went Platinum and "Blacks Magic" became a best seller. Salt, Pepa and DJ Spin were finally recognized for their production and leadership talents without Hurby. For Dana Mozie of Washington DC, "Expression" was his first Industry production.
myspace.com/danadum
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