By ann summers

This is a world with many versions of rap: Chinese, Iranian, Pakistani, Mexican, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the culture of Bizarro-World would come up with Black Republican rap for Ben Carson. Finally a music that’s libertarian enough for former Marxists like Thomas Sowell!

Unfortunately, aside from Vanilla Ice, I am reminded of an early SNL bit where two white guys in golfwear do hip-hop and the more recent parody of the Fox Network’s Empire.

Ben Carson’s new “urban” radio ad drops Friday in eight cities, including Miami, Atlanta, and Houston, with the goal of reaching out to young black voters who, the Carson campaign admits, are “a non-traditional voting market for Republicans.” Carson has already picked up one vote from that market, though, in Aspiring Mogul, the self-described “Christian Republican Rapper” who raps in the ad alongside snippets of Carson’s stump speech.

Neither Mogul nor the Carson campaign responded to a request for comment on how long they’ve known each other and how they came to work together.

It’s hard to tell if rapping is a sideline to Aspiring Mogul’s Republican political activities or vice-versa. According to his website, he’s a founding member of the Savannah (Ga.) Black Republican Council and a race relations expert for the Georgia GOP.

Although the site doesn’t list his real name, and his Facebook page also uses a pseudonym, it appears Aspiring Mogul is young Republican Rob Donaldson, who described himself to the Savannah Morning News in 2013 as a “rapper who reads the Wall Street Journal,” and bemoaned the Republican party’s lack of pop-cultural cachet:

“We have to learn to be cool,” he said. “The Democrats had Beyoncé’s music at their 2012 convention. We had Clint Eastwood.”

Assuming Donaldson is Aspiring Mogul—and how many other Vice-Chairs of the Savannah Area Young Republicans are black and “in the recording business?”—he seems to have taken the challenge of closing the GOP’s conspicuous coolness gap into his own hands.