TWENTY YEARS AGO, Grandmaster Melle Mel commemorated Jesse Jackson’s initial run for the White House with a song simply titled “Jesse.” The single didn’t do much better than Jackson’s campaign, barely scraping the lower reaches of the R&B charts, but it nonetheless marked hip-hop’s first significant involvement in presidential politics.

Today, any serious Democratic presidential candidate has to kiss the ring of the hip-hop community sooner or later–no matter how ridiculous it makes him look. Thus, in election years comedy writers get the manna that keeps them in the business, such as when John Kerry made his pilgrimage to hip-hop Mecca. In an MTV interview, Kerry claimed to be “fascinated by rap and hip-hop,” cleverly observed that “there’s a lot of poetry in it,” and delivered the sort of condescending cultural warning Northeastern liberals have imprinted in their DNA: “I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important.”