Rock the Vote

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 registration ads in 20 big-city newspapers, signed by 19 of its acts, including 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.