Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/061592/0615460.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 9KB | 185 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 66

Rock the Vote


In this election year, pop stars, record firms and cable channels
have launched a campaign to get 18-to-24-year-old Americans
to "just say yes" to politics

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    Rapper Ice-T challenges his fans to take action. "We got
two options," he says. "Either vote or hostile takeover. I'm
down with either one. We're youth; we have to change things."
Pop vamp Madonna literally wraps her otherwise scantily clad
body in the American flag and cries out "Vote!" to the staccato
rhythms of her hit song Vogue, ending with the admonition, "If
you don't vote, you're going to get a spankie."

    O.K., the faces are standard currency on MTV, where these
spots appear. And the beat is right. But what gives with all the
flag waving? Well, yo, young America. These unconventional
calls to patriotic duty are part of a broadly orchestrated
campaign by celebrities, cable channels and record companies to
get youths involved in the electoral process. "The idea," says
Jody Uttal, co-founder of the voter-registration group Rock the
Vote, which produced the Ice-T and Madonna videos, "is to raise
the political consciousness of kids and to make voting hip."

    Right now it isn't. Only 33.2% of U.S. 18-to-21-year-olds
voted in the last presidential election. That dismal turnout
continued a steady decline since 1971, when the 26th Amendment
lowered the voting age to 18. In that year 48.3% of the eligible
young cast a ballot. Says Sanford D. Horwitt, director of the
Citizen Participation Project for People for the American Way:
"It's as though someone has done a very successful `Just Say No
to Politics' campaign."

    Voting by all age groups has declined over the past three
decades, of course, as leaders have floundered, scandals have
mounted and cynicism has set in. But while their elders may
recall the glory days of John F. Kennedy or even Franklin D.
Roosevelt, people in the generation now coming of age have no
memory of a time when politics was considered a noble endeavor
and the men and women who practiced it were revered as pure
heroes. "For a lot of people my age, their first political
memory is Watergate," says Jonathan Cohn, a 22-year-old
assistant editor at the American Prospect, a liberal quarterly.
"That's not exactly a great foot to get started off on, where
your President is a crook and the government is corrupt."

    Schools, labor unions and other institutions that once
educated young people about voting have also fallen down on the
job. In a 1989 survey of 1,006 youths by People for the
American Way, only 12% rated voting as a basic tenet of good
citizenship. "There's a whole generation of people growing up
who should be our future leaders but who are very disaffected,
and that's scary," says Cohn.

    Now rock musicians and other celebrities are stepping in
to do the job. This week Elektra Entertainment is taking out
full-page voter reg istration ads in 20 big-city newspapers,
signed by 19 of its acts, includ ing Anthrax, KRS-One, Anita
Baker and the Kronos Quartet. Rock the Vote lobbied in Congress
for the "motor-voter" bill, which would offset the cumbersome
registration procedures in many states by requiring that
registration cards be issued along with driver's licenses.

    On television, live coverage of the Democratic and
Republican conventions has been scheduled where many would say
it belongs: on Comedy Central, the cable comedy channel. The
anchor will be Saturday Night Live's Al Franken. Comedy Central
plans to invite guest analysts ranging from Republican
strategist Roger Ailes to gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, as
well as the candidates themselves. Entertainment is clearly the
channel's first objective, but the producers insist their
coverage will be informative too. "The hope is that by providing
facts in this more appealing way, we will be seducing more
people into this process," says Mary Salter, vice president for
current programs and production.

    Such political activism is hardly free of self-interest.
Comedy Central's ratings nearly tripled when it provided
humorous commentary to accompany President Bush's State of the
Union address last January. Its more ambitious convention
coverage, it hopes, will woo even more viewers to the channel.
The motive of the record-industry executives who started Rock
the Vote two years ago was to ward off censorship in the music
business. They believed that their best defense against
restrictive legislation would be to mobilize a constituency of
voters among young music fans. Hence the organization set up
voter-registration tables at rock concerts. (Twenty-eight states
and the District of Columbia allow mail-in registration.) Last
summer's successful Lollapalooza tour, which featured musicians
ranging from Jane's Addiction to Ice-T, added 25,000 new voters
to the rolls.

    Rock the Vote also helped recruit new voters in New
Hampshire, even bringing director Oliver Stone to Dartmouth for
a screening of his movie JFK, and to talk about the importance
of participating in the political process. The result: 8,000 new
voters, an estimated 90% of whom, according to Rock the Vote,
cast a ballot in last February's primary. Future plans include
a Sept. 15 TV special on voting featuring myriad famous faces,
sponsored by youth-conscious Pepsi, and broadcast on the
consciously hip Fox network, home to Bart Simpson and the trendy
gang from Beverly Hills, 90210.

    MTV's plans are even more extensive. In addition to airing
Rock the Vote public-service announcements, the music cable
channel has assigned a reporter -- 24-year-old Tabitha Soren --
to cover the campaign and file regular reports as part of what
it calls its "Choose or Lose" campaign. "After 10 years we know
we have the attention of our audience, so it's time to do
something with it," declares creative director Judy McGrath.

    Soren's reports might best be described as rock news
videos, complete with hip sound tracks, eye-popping editing
techniques, funky graphics and plenty of youth-on-the-street
sound bites ("I think Dan Quayle's hot," says one woman in
response to a question about the Republicans). But there is
substance too. The reports average four minutes in length --
luxurious by network-news standards -- and take on issues
relevant to young people, such as parental notification for
teens who seek abortions.

    MTV has also collaborated with the League of Women Voters
on a user-friendly guide to voter registration in all 50
states, which will be distributed at events sponsored by the
channel between now and November. In August MTV will air a
weekend-long telethon, soliciting registrations instead of
money. Viewers will be invited to phone in and speak to
celebrities about where they can sign up to vote. "Kids emulate
rock stars in everything else," says Soren, "so why not in
this?"

    Although it clearly has its merits, pop patriotism does
run the risk of trivializing the electoral process. What, for
example, would have been the effect if Comedy Central had
provided commentary when Mario Cuomo made his eloquent "family
of America" speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention? Can it
really be considered progress if youths vote for a candidate
solely because Michael Bolton says they should? People need
reasons beyond that, argues Curtis Gans, who heads the Committee
for the Study of the American Electorate. "If we used that star
quality to help kids figure out something they'd like to change
in their community and showed them how to change it, then we'd
have real politics."

    Until Madonna is moved to lead a rally to the local
garbage dump, Gans favors educational efforts like the First
Vote campaign sponsored by People for the American Way. Its
classroom instruction method, in which teachers devote a social
studies period to the electoral process and register students
right in the classroom, is based on a Dade County, Fla., program
that registers around 12,000 high school students every year.
Meanwhile Channel One, the advertiser-supported television
service that is provided to public and private schools, is
planning a mock election in which its 7.1 million viewers,
assisted by a teacher-preparation guide, can vote for their
favorite candidates a week before the rest of the nation makes
its choice.

    All this activity hasn't gone unnoticed in political
camps. Bill Clinton, who played the saxophone on The Arsenio
Hall Show last week, has accepted an offer to appear on a youth
forum that MTV will air later this year, and the Bush campaign
is seriously considering its own invitation. After all, with 27
million potential voters between the ages of 18 and 24, it
could be a definite advantage to be known, as they say on MTV,
as a real buff dude.