In September 2016 President Donald Trump, in an effort to stoke racial animus and drive conversation away from his administration specifically and from police actions against African Americans in general, sought to direct the ire of his supporters and middle-income white Americans against NFL players who, following the lead of Colin Kaepernick, took a knee during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality. Since Trump’s election, the president has engaged in a number of such actions, including expressing implicit support for white nationalists and supremacists in Charlottesville. At the end of that month, during the BET Hip-hop Awards, Detroit-based MC Eminem responded in a blistering two-minute freestyle that while base, vulgar, and sexist, asked his fans (many of them white) to make a stark decision—either support Donald Trump or him. To date his video has been viewed approximately 2.28 million times.

Although neither hip-hop in general nor rap specifically were created as political vehicles, they have always served as political vehicles. In the mid- to late-eighties east and west coast MCs rhetorically attacked police surveillance and violence, presaging Black Lives Matter activism by decades. In the mid-nineties, as the neoliberal turn began to take hold, we watched MCs increasingly see themselves as entrepreneurs of their own human capital. And in the dawn of the Obama/Trump era we see MCs like Kendrick Lamar eviscerate both men. And as black youth and whites of all ages increased their consumption of rap, anxiety about its effects have led some to castigate it as part of modern-day respectability projects. In the early nineties C. Delores Tucker used criticism of rap effectively to bolster her political career, while Oprah Winfrey dedicated a number of episodes to rap’s harmful effects a year after Obama’s election.

In partial response to the growing power of hip-hop and rap, both inside and outside of the United States, a range of scholars have begun to examine its effects. For some, like Cathy Cohen, rap has served as a sometimes powerful vehicle of youth socialization. For others, like the late Richard Iton, rap limns intra-racial fault lines, particularly in the wake of welfare reform. While the literature on rap and politics is growing, for the most part this body of work has largely ignored substantial intra-genre differences. Kendrick Lamar is not Lil Wayne is not Lor Scoota (RIP) is not Childish Gambino. Political rap is a distinctly different sub-genre of rap that has its own content and arguably has its own unique effects.

At least this is the claim made by Lakeyta Bonnette’s Power to the People. Bonnette’s work seeks to accomplish three tasks—to distinguish political rap from other genres, to test the specific effects of political rap on black youth attitudes, and to chart the relationship between political rap and hip-hop more broadly and black politics. While the research on rap and hip-hop have grown substantially since Tricia Rose’s Black Noise was published in 1994, this body of work has largely ignored the fact that there is one distinct genre of rap that has the explicit intent of both moving the crowd bodily and politically. While charting the effect of rap on populations (black and non-black) may help move the literature forward, charting the effect of political rap specifically may give us more analytical purchase than examining the effect of rap broadly considered.

How effective is Bonnette at achieving her aims? Her work is most effective at charting the significant differences between genres of rap. Defining political rap as rap that contains a political reference and refers to a social problem/issue and/or advocates a solution to injustice does more to distinguish political rap from other genres than either focusing on an artist or by performing close readings of rap music, particularly for the purpose of empirical testing. To test effects she conducts two experiments on black respondents, exposing them either to a control or to one of four genres of music (political rap, non-political rap, rhythm and blues, pop), and then administering a survey designed to assess support for either black nationalism or black feminism. She reports effects for one of the treatments—she states that listening to political rap and non-political rap has an effect on the level of support listeners express for black nationalism (those exposed to political rap were approximately 20% more likely to express support for black nationalism than those in the control group, while those exposed to nonpolitical rap were approximately 20% less likely than those exposed to the control to express such support).

Bonnette also reports that listening to non-political rap has an effect on the level of support listeners express for black feminism. However, she never reports the effect size. Further she does not provide tables depicting data about either the experiment or demographic information about her respondents. This hampers the reader’s willingness to accept the findings. Her final analysis of the effect between rap and hip-hop and black politics focuses on some of the same terrain and organizations covered in other work, but adds a number of instances in which hip-hop activists organized against violence later associated with Black Lives Matter.

Although some argue that black popular culture is not the proper space to look to for politics, Bonnette’s work suggests that examining rap and hip-hop more broadly may prove a fruitful endeavor for scholars. But several questions remain. If the effects she charts hold up, how long do they hold up—are the effects stable over time? Do they hold up after exposure to other genres of music? What effects, if any, does rap consumption have on behavior? Similarly, does an increase in political rap presage large scale protest, or come after large scale protest? How might we chart the growth and spread of political rap over space? Are there certain institutional designs that make political rap more rather than less likely? As rap is produced within a cultural industry how do changes in the industry (and in attempts to regulate it) affect the production of political rap?

These questions are ones that we can begin to think about thanks to Bonnette’s work at detailing the differences between genres. But besides the empirical issues I note above, the work would’ve been better had she not only defined political rap but made some attempt to discern how ubiquitous political rap is. Is political rap a substantial genre within hip-hop and rap more broadly or is it a smaller genre with little to no real impact? If we were to look at hip-hop and rap across time would we find that the numbers of political rap records increase over time or decrease? Or better yet, do they rise and fall in response to political activities in the world? Unlike other work in the area Bonnette does not give the reader a sense of how prevalent the genre is. The key, rather than taking Bonnette’s work as the end of the story, is to take her scholarship as a useful starting point for future research projects.