The third GOP debate of the season is Wednesday night, with only 183,000 to go before the Iowa Caucuses in February. Will Trump say something outrageous? Will the candidates struggle to name a woman they’d put on currency? Will a new frontrunner emerge as people get bored with Ben Carson? Mercifully, we are not obligated to pretend that the latest in a very long line of GOP debates is actually all that interesting, so instead: Have y’all heard this rap song from an artist named Jük all about how great Ted Cruz is?
“Time For Truth” is a four-and-a-half minute opus dedicated to letting listeners know that Ted Cruz is America’s best option to be the next president of the United States. The beat’s legitimately catchy, although Jük could have probably stood to invest in a hook that differentiated itself a bit more from the verses. But nobody listens to a supporter-made political campaign rap theme song because they’re expecting a banger.
Partly a diss track directed toward Barack Obama (who appears in the video alongside Hillary Clinton, sorta), Jük raps political threats to the current president such as, “Ted Cruz is gonna reduce to ashes your bad laws and taxes/All you’ve done to jack up our country/Ted Cruz is bringing it back for the rich and the hungry.”
Favoring the rich over the hungry is a decidedly late-nineties thing to do in a rap song, and would perhaps be more appropriate for Puff Daddy sipping Cristal on a yacht than an ode to Texas’s junior senator. Nonetheless, Jük delivers his Obama disses both with his words (“Instead of a president who thinks he’s a king/Putting executive orders on everything”) and his physicality, delivering an A+ “get a load of this guy face” to the person in the Obama mask as he delivers the line.
After laying out the case against Obama (something that plenty of people on the stage at Wednesday’s debate will do to raucous applause) Jük turns his verbal attention to the candidate of his choice. “He’s taken down Obamacare and Planned Parenthood/One is disgusting, the other’s no good/He’s taken down Dodd-Frank and weak immigration/Building back up our military foundation,” Jük claims, citing laws that are still in effect and an organization that still exists. His boasts are, perhaps, a bit exaggerated—but that’s no sin in hip hop, so perhaps it’s unfair to fact check the rhymes.
Regardless, the enthusiasm from bedroom rappers for Cruz is a bit surprising. It’s no shock to learn how many times Donald Trump has been name-checked in hip hop—he’s been a major pop culture figure for decades—but the rise of Ted Cruz rap is unlikely. And we’re still in the early days of the 2016 election. If Cruz goes on to secure the nomination (not out of the question), then odds are we’ll see even more amateur emcees pulling out the rhyming dictionaries to find more words that sound good paired with “Cruz.”
