A Working Vacation

Japan is bordering on nuclear meltdown, Gadafi is slaughtering his citizens in Libya, and Charlie Sheen has launched a violent torpedo of truth stateside. As the world burns around him, Obama went on Spring Break 2011.

Well, that’s what his critics would like you to think. To them, the President wasted his time relaxing on the Brazilian beaches and drinking Chilean wine during his diplomatic trip to Central and South America when he should have been seated in the Oval Office saving the world. But Obama was right not to cancel his tour of the Southern cone, despite recent world events; to do so would have been a slap in the face to a region that is historically slighted but presently vital.

It's not as if Obama's trip prevented him from doing what was in our national interest during the situations in Asia and North Africa. In regards to Libya, from the moment the President touched down in Brazil he was involved in briefings, meetings, and conference calls with Washington making decisions about US military action. In fact, strategy meetings on Libya were both the first and last things Obama did in South America. People seem to forget that we live in a highly interconnected world, one in which the President could conduct his necessary business from anywhere. Secure connections to DC were established whenever Obama was on the ground in Brazil, Chile, or El Salvador, and while most of us watch re-runs of sitcoms while we sit through cramped plane rides, he has an entire mobile command center at his fingertips midair in Air Force One. Even in the middle of a state dinner in Chile he was receiving updates about the US fighter jet crash in Libya. Obama is famously our most technology addicted President (remember all the articles about giving up his precious Blackberry when he first entered office?), and, like a teenager waiting for gossip during a family dinner, distance was not going to get in the way of doing what needed to be done.

All of the technology Obama has to communicate with is public knowledge, so it seems like those criticizing the trip south are more opposed to the symbolic disappearance of Our President from Washington, DC during a time of international crisis. Yes, it is still a bit disturbing to think that, while our soldiers are prepping for air strikes in Libya and risking nuclear exposure in Japan, Obama was posing for family snapshots under Cristo Redentor; again, not because he was inactive about the global crises, but because it looks as if he bailed when the going got tough. But for those so concerned about perception, consider what it would have looked like if Obama had cancelled the trip.

The journey took Obama first to Brazil, a state that both the US and the rest of the world acknowledge to be important in the very near future. It is the largest economy in South America and still growing, it will host the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, and it has a huge oil reserve that presents an alternative to exorbitant Middle Eastern petrol prices; it's nominal membership in the Big Four/BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries alone announces its global growth and importance in the coming years. To cancel his visits with the newly elected, first female President Dilma Rousseff would have been disrespectful to a nation that we cannot afford to disrespect--especially as, like the rest of Latin America, it forms stronger ties to China.

Obama then travelled to Chile, where a US president met one-on-one with a Chilean president in Chile for the first time in over two decades. The last time was when Bush senior visited in 1990, to visit with the then-newly inaugurated President Lagos--the first elected Chilean head of state since the US-supported coup that put military tyrant and human rights abuser Augusto Pinochet in power for 17 years. In the time since that last visit, the US has become a huge consumer of Chilean exports, particularly agricultural products such as fruit and wine, and Chile has become the most economically competitive state in its region, even joining the OECD. Plus, just over a year ago Chile experienced an 8.8 earthquake (coming in just under the 9.0 in Japan) and has barely skipped a beat during its recovery. As with Brazil, to slight Chile by canceling his meetings with President Piñera would have been a symbolic backhand in the face of a state the holds rising economic power in our immediate vicinity.

The last leg of the trip was somewhat randomly to El Salvador, but again this is a nation that has symbolic if not material gravitas for the US. The small Central American state is important as more workers migrate to the US and illegal drug activity is pushed south of Mexico, but also because it is controlled by a leftist and Marxist-guerilla backed president that wants to build a strong relationship with the US; President Funes felt that Obama's planned visit was validation of his state's importance and his domestically criticized pro-Washington stance. To cancel would have been to turn back on a state that has gone out on an unprecedented limb to warm to the US despite being far-leftist.

Each of the states that Obama visited hold measurable and emblematic importance to US relations, particularly when it comes to economic and political alliance; securing pan-American agendas that include US interests such as oil, free trade, and democracy is rightfully so a priority of this administration. Plus, one of the blessings of our technology addicted world is this: President Obama can save the world from anywhere.

Don't Forget About Latin America

President Obama has caught some serious flack for his visit to South America this week, mostly by those saying that he should be focused on the current disasters in Libya and Japan. While these tragedies obviously deserve Obama's attention, it's ludicrous to say he should have cancelled his long-awaited trip South. Rick Sanchez wrote a fantastic piece for The Huffington Post on the necessity of the trip; explaining it's importance, he says:

Going to Latin America isn't a party, it doesn't interfere with your [Obama's] duties, and it's not about job creation. It's about far more than that. Going to Latin America is the work of the president, important and essential work, and it's in our national and strategic interest.

It's about treating Latin America as equal partners, something you, President Obama, promised at the Summit of the Americas in 2009. It's about cultivating a stronger relationship with this part of the world and sending a message to Latin America, as well as Latino-Americans here at home, about their importance in the global economy as well as national and international politics.

He touches on what America has not been doing for the past, oh, let's say six decades--the North American reluctance to deal with their neighbors down below. Hopefully this trip will be exactly what Sanchez calls it, an opportunity to reforge relations with our natural geographical allies and diplomatic partners. Of course, the trip is just getting underway so who knows. But even though there's a lot going on outside of our hemisphere, we'll be watching.

Guys, he looked REALLY hard. 

And in other Latin American news, Hugo Chavez says capitalism wiped out life on Mars.

Wyclef Jean: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy...Sort Of

About a week ago I talked about Wyclef Jean as an example of political activism run rampant in rap music, specifically mentioning his track "If I Was President." A sampling of the lyrics if you please:

If I was President, I'd get elected on Friday,

Assassinated on Saturday, buried on Sunday.  

Well, I suppose life imitates art.

Last Saturday night, Wyclef Jean was shot during Haiti's presidential elections. No, he was not elected president the day before and he did not die; the shot was actually to the hand, and whether or not it was actually a bullet is still sketchy. But still, a little eerie.

 

Tell Me What You Want From Me

Following in the footsteps of music executive Steve Stoute, I am writing a letter to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences regarding the 2011 Grammys. The letter is seven words, short and sweet:

To Whom It May Concern:
What more do you want from Eminem?

Last month, Eminem was nominated for 10 Grammy awards for Recovery, his album chronicling the struggles of a man just recently emerged from the cycle of domestic violence and drug abuse that fueled his violent lyrical career for a decade, and in every category that did not explicitly contain “rap” in the title he lost. This was not the first slight to Eminem, whose 2000 Album of the Year loss to the reemergence of Steely Dan is often cited as one of the most heinous Grammy snubs ever; the Eminem case and the omission of rapper Guru from the obituary reel are the most recent indicators of an out-of-touch academy that has passed on the works of rap powerhouses Jay-Z, Kanye West, Public Enemy, and Dr. Dre in any category not limited to their genre. The pattern begs the question: Does NARSA, and by extension the community of the musical elite, accept rap music as valid? They don’t, but they should. The Grammy Academy needs to stop turning its back on the most creative genre of our generation and accept that rap is an enduring art form that will long outlast the critics who consider it all to be the misogynistic or sadistic dregs of jazz and soul; rap will continue as an important part of cultural expression facilitating social consciousness, political activism, and poetry.

Rap has many merits that qualify it as a valuable form of cultural expression, from the innovative uses of sampling and remixing to the creation of new beats, but most fascinating is its often-ignored lyrical depth. Yes, there is a significant percentage of rap music that is, to put it nicely, shallow; critics are quick to jump on the lower content of the genre: easy women, fancy cars, recreational drug use, and violence (gang, domestic, police—the list is extensive). They turn a blind eye to the diverse lyricism of rap and choose to focus on themes that, in a truly demented way, are just perversions of our purest national obsession: The American Dream. To say that these are definitive of a category as broad as rap, or its even broader parent hip-hop, is recklessly metonymic.

Since its inception, rap has had a decidedly socio-economic bent. Whether under- or overtones in an overall track, the themes of poverty, crime, and racial conflict are represented throughout the last three decades of rhymes. The ways in which these themes are addressed has evolved as rappers have taken a different position in society, but they always reflect the unfortunate realities of the haves and the have-nots. In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message,” commenting on the issues of debt, education, prostitution, inflation, and unemployment in just seven minutes; The Notorious B.I.G. spun a similar tale with a happier ending in 1994’s rags-to-riches track “Juicy,” and Jay-Z picked up where that left off chronicling the perils of fame in 2001’s “Heart of the City.” And even off of Eminem’s Recovery there is the “Love The Way You Lie,” a wrenching duet with survivor Rihanna that exposed the inner-workings of an abusive relationship in a more real way than a psychology textbook ever could. Social awareness is a huge cornerstone of rap content. Admittedly, not every track is socially conscious; songs like “No Hands” and “Look At Me Now,” while catchy, are more about boasting about sexual prowess than acknowledging the dangers of promiscuity. But this is exactly the point, that rap is a diverse genre that churns out a significant amount of culturally relevant and artistically important work.

Rap is also infused with politics, making it a viable artistic expression of a moment or movement. Artists such as Common involved themselves in social and political campaigns, while others are figureheads for political movements like “the ghetto’s populist prince” Tupac. Again, not every work of politically inclined rap is a winner; for every brilliant call to vote like Wyclef Jean’s “If I Were President,” there is a misguided effort like Young Jeezy’s “My President.” But the message persists in making rap part of our political history, another primary source in our analysis of the century. Internationally, rap has really taken off as a mechanism for idea diffusion and political change. Lyricist El Général spit the anthem for protesters in his native Tunisia, while secretive rapper Ibn Thabit did the same for Libya; less incendiary sociopolitical leanings also pop up in the music of UK rapper Plan B and French-Senegalese rapper MC Solaar.

But even if rap was as hollow and meaningless as some have claimed, there is no denying the sheer beauty of (some of) it. As I’ve qualified everything thus far, this is not a blanket statement for all rap; some lyrics are vapid, ill conceived, and just grammatically incorrect. But others are modern-day poetry made for mass consumption and more readily consumed by our attention-challenged generation. Single line pop-culture quips by popular artists such as Kanye West (“Mayonnaise colored Benz, I push Miracle Whips”) are matched by indie rappers like Childish Gambino (“I move real quick like Nestle/Let me make it clear for a second like Pepsi”), elaborate metaphors are spun (such as the life of hip hop in Common’s “Used to Love H.E.R.”), and creative imagery is used to avoid censors. It is poetry to a beat, and the artistry behind the best rappers’ lyrics overrule objections based on their bedfellows’ lesser ones. It is through this lyricism, so poetic and socially relevant, that rap captures important moments in time through cultural expression that needs to be recognized for what it truly is—good music.