David Saucedo didn't give up rapping when he became a youth minister and tea partyer.

The ex-felon just swapped out rhymes about drugs and misogyny for those about liberty and God.

His stage name Polatik , which he created while under the influence of anarchists in a Texas prison, turned out to be ironically prescient. Today, Saucedo uses his rhymes to champion the Constitution and urge young activists to get politically involved.

"They're taking our freedom, we're going to take it back. Pretty soon when we breathe, they'll be taxing that," he rapped on stage during the April 15 tea-party rally in D.C.

Saucedo is the rare conservative in a growing movement that uses hip hop, the youth subculture surrounding rap music, to get disillusioned youth interested in activism.

On the liberal end of the spectrum, groups like the Hip Hop Caucus partner with musicians to register voters and hold concerts that double as political rallies.

"Hip hop brings people into a collective," Lennox Yearwood, Jr., who runs the Caucus, said. "Young people probably feel much more aligned to hip hop than they would faith establishments and civil institutions."

During the 2008 election, the group launched a voter drive with artist T.I. just as he was about to lose his own right to vote over a felony gun charge.

Other groups may have shied away from his criminal record, but Yearwood said it was an opportunity to use pop-culture news to the group's advantage.

"Nobody was asking him to voter registration drives, but we figured he'd be great," Yearwood said with a laugh. "His message was, 'You have a gift that I don't have anymore. Take it very, very seriously.'"

And they did. The group registered thousands of first-time voters through the campaign.

Artists played a bigger role in the elections by making Barack Obama's presidential bid seem cool, according to Marcella Runell Hall, who teaches about the politics of hip hop at New York University.

"Jay-Z's support did influence things," Hall said, likening his influence in the hip-hop community to that of Oprah. "If he had been against Obama, that would have mattered too."

That election wasn't the first time rappers delved into electoral politics. Sean Combs' Vote or Die campaign urged young people to cast a vote in 2004.

In 1992, MTV was one of the first to tap into pop culture for activism. The music channel launched a Choose or Lose campaign with the goal of registered 20 million youth to vote.

But Hall noted that the political roots of hip hop run even deeper.

"Older hip hop had a politicization about it," she said. "It offered a lens and voice that wasn't being articulated in other places because it was coming from people of color."

She argued that the genre is unique in being, as rapper Chuck D famously said, "the black CNN."

While country and rock are sometimes used for political expression, she said, "It's not a consistent expectation in those genres the way it is with hip hop."

There are technical reasons why that may be the case, too. Rapping lets artists to cram in more words into a single track, and listeners expect the content to draw from the artist's life experiences.

Today, many old-school fans of rap bemoan its commercialization. But a few artists like Talib Kweli continue using the genre to influence listeners politically.

Kweli's newest single, "Papers Please," calls Arizona's recently passed immigration enforcement law the new Jim Crow.

He told the Washington Post that fans inspired the song by tweeting that he should boycott his scheduled performances in Arizona. He decided to still go but play the protest song while there.

Saucedo uses raps to educate, too, albeit with a different political persuasion.

He plans to run for Congress from his home district in Waco, Texas, to institute his plans to privatize job creation and get people off welfare.

After rapping at tea-party rallies in 31 states, he has created his first album and wants to be a mainstream artist as well.

"Music will definitely always be a line of communication that I use to reach out," Saucedo said. "The leaders right now seem to miss two things: communication and relationships. They don't know how to build relationships with people who are so different from them."

Ambreen Ali writes for Congress.org.

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