Young black activists roared their approval when Barack Obama recently greeted criticism on the trail by dusting off his shoulders, a reference to a rap song by Jay-Z called "Dirt Off Your Shoulder." The media covering the moment went crazy, too. Washington Post reporter Teresa Wiltz hailed Obama’s moves and called it a "seminal moment in the campaign, the merging of politics and pop culture," and noted the lyrics suggest "If you feelin’ like a pimp...go and brush your shoulders off."
So Barack Obama is feeling like a pimp?
Online at "The Root," a Washington Post website for African-Americans, Obama supporter and Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell was sky high. "Like every other hip-hop generation voter in America I went crazy when he did it," she wrote. "I almost couldn’t believe it. It was a perfect moment."
Harris-Lacewell read that moment as a sign of racial swagger and solidarity with "his base of young urban brown and black voters" and they loved it. "He displayed all the familiar self-assurance and bravado of the hip-hop emcee. The people who got it went nuts, while those who don’t know hip-hop just thought he was being funny and confident."
The video went viral and became a YouTube sensation.












If you've always thought her music was hackneyed and dull now you may have another reason to dislike Alicia Keys: she's apparently a
So, you think Nobel Laureate Al Gore is the only Democrat that can win meaningless awards from sycophantic Hollywoodans?
I am hard pressed to call anything that happens in the Entertainment media "news," but
Will this rap song with a positive message get any play in the MSM? Will a rapper that is telling kids to quit acting like a punk and grow up resonate?
The new album from The Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden, is just one long, sustained attack on the integrity of the United States and is as bad as any loud-mouthed Dixie Chicks diatribe. With songs prosaically about Global Warming and the evil American “empire,” seemingly the only one of the band who just wanted to entertain the fans was Joe Walsh, the others too puffed up with their own sense of superiority to bother. Unfortunately, what we have here just another exclamation from pampered rock stars that they are smarter, more environmentally friendly and more caring than the rest of us... but be sure and buy more albums for gifts folks! This album should have been titled “Long Trip to the Bank” because for much of it the band seems to be on autopilot and too much of it seems like a cynically geared ploy to sell plastic as opposed to a solid attempt to entertain. It seems that they consciously wrote this one to appeal to sectors of the radio market -- the country market, adult contemporary -- so much so that the album lacks freshness. Several of the songs are so obviously written to have a country sound in an effort to get airplay on America’s country stations, for instance, that it’s a bit hard to get past the obvious ploy to enjoy the tunes.
Are profane, sexist, and violent rap lyrics harming America? That question was asked at a House hearing convened yesterday to 
The Grammy Award-winning band “Rage Against the Machine” reunited after a seven-year hiatus to perform at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, this weekend. 
performance was one of his favorites, he said it was "right up there," and then said "no, no, no" and insisted that his favorite song is the lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge's song "I Need to Wake Up." Guess why? It's up for an Oscar for its inclusion in Gore's film.