Rappers took the White House. Now what?

You can learn a lot about rap’s relationship to politics from Russell Simmons. Before he was an accused predator in exile, the Def Jam co-founder was a mogul who used savoir-faire to climb into higher strata. He didn’t vote until he was 39, but by the late 1990s he’d become a crusader, hosting fundraisers for then-first lady Hillary Clinton and co-founding the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. He argued hip-hop could be an effective tool of civil rights, though his language notably centered a material focus: “It’s the difference between 40 acres and a mule and 40 acres and a Bentley,” he told The New York Times in 2002. Simmons would ultimately become a bit more issue-conscious than many in the hip-hop set, backing the Occupy movement and endorsing his longtime friend Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 because of the latter’s stance on the factory farming lobby, but his efforts also reinforced his own position as a change-maker with powerful friends. In a Bloomberg profile, Randy Credico, co-founder of the nonprofit Mothers of the New York Disappeared, challenged Simmons’ intent: “This is about ego for him. If he wanted to do something useful, he could move his Phat Farm line...