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.E P I L O G U EBigger Than Hip HopVote or Die!— S E A N “ P.D I D DY ” C O M B SNovember 2, 2004 was hip hop’s first day of real political reckoning.For more than a year eƒorts to energize the “hip-hop vote” had beenin full swing.Russell Simmons’s Hip Hop Summit Action Network(HSAN) had called on some of the movement’s biggest stars to at-tract huge crowds to rallies with the intention of registering young voters.In June of 2004 the National Hip-Hop Political Conventiongathered in New Jersey.Organizers, aware that hip hop lacks a formal political agenda, tried unsuccessfully to craft a party platform.That same summer Sean “P.Diddy” Combs’s Citizen Change, a hip-hopinspired initiative, tossed its hat in the national political arena.Combs even attended the Democratic and Republican political con-ventions, drumming up support for his initiative and the quest tomake young people’s voices heard on election day.Two weeks before election Tuesday, Combs took his act to Ohio,Michigan, and Florida, three crucial battleground states.CitizenChange, like the HSAN, relied on a number of well-known faces, in-cluding Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben A~eck, and Mary J.Blige, to cap-ture young people’s attention.The T-shirt sporting Combs’s political slogan, “Vote or Die!,” was a huge hit.In Detroit he told an enthusi-astic crowd of about six thousand that, “This year we’re not going to sit on the sidelines and complain, we’re going to decide the next pres-ident of the United States.” It was a bold claim and an even bolder249
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