Surely Rubio is a fan of 2Pac’s biggest hit, the posthumously released “Changes.” The first verse of the song posits that ’80s-era conservatives, with President Reagan at the center, shipped cocaine and guns into the hood to, as he rapped on “Words of Wisdom,” “eliminate the problem” of “troublesome black youth of the ghetto”:

“Give the crack to the kids; who the hell cares?
One less hungry mouth on the welfare!”
First ship ’em dope and let ’em deal to brothers
Give ’em guns, step back, watch ’em kill each other.

The theory is returned to in the third verse in a tight, two-line denunciation of the Reagan turn from a Johnson-era “Great Society” ethos to one of austerity and mass incarceration: “Instead of war on poverty / They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”

Rubio tries to hedge by saying, “I don’t listen to music for the politics of it,” despite explaining how rappers like 2Pac “were like reporters … reporting about what life was like.” In other words, you’ve been told how it is, but you didn’t listen. Which seems worse than never having been informed.

2Pac would likely despise what Rubio is doing, appropriating black cultural expression and stripping it of its inherent socio-political dimension in order to gain power in the Republican Party. The cultural crime of appropriation is much discussed in the hip-hop world right now, with stars like Iggy Azalea essentially wearing black and hip-hop culture like an outfit that she hops out of as soon as Ferguson erupts and blackness isn’t fun anymore, but one imagines that 2Pac might see Rubio’s appropriative move as vastly worse than entertainers borrowing black culture for a paycheck. Rubio is enlisting 2Pac in absentia in order to gain the power to enact policies Pac would’ve found abhorrent.

Republicans, especially in their late turn toward Tea Party extremism, don’t seem to understand that pop music is very often populist music, even radical, and that it very often emerges in response to them, to the rightward movement of the country. Take New Jersey governor (and possible presidential candidate) Chris Christie, who is somehow able to square his love of Bruce Springsteen — an artist whose most popular work was born out of the rejection of conservatism, post-industrial late capitalism, and Reagan’s ’80s — with his own life as a leading Republican figure. Christie, normally pugnacious, is even a little pitiful in his hope that The Boss would be friends with him. Or former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who suffered a seething rebuke from Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello after it became known that the band was Ryan’s favorite. “Paul Ryan is the embodiment of the machine our music rages against,” the guitarist wrote in Rolling Stone. Ouch.

Sorry, guys, but some of the best music of the past 40 years is made by people who just don’t like what you stand for — like pretty much the entirety of hip-hop. Y’all get super PACs, y’all get power, y’all get to spin around the lucrative revolving door of Congress-industry-Congress-lobbying-etc., but we get hip-hop. We get Bruce Springsteen. We get Rage Against the Machine.

Y’all get Ted Nugent; that’s the deal.