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In an episode of Saturday Night Live with more of a musical sketch, the star wasn’t John Mulaney’s usual lightly comedic Broadway revue, but rather a groovy, 70s-tinged, extremely depressing ‘take out the vote’ PSA called ‘Strollin’. In the song, a group of four black voters – Crazy Legs Jimmy (Kenan Thompson), Rubber Band Ronnie (Chris Redd), Pitty Pat Patricia (Punkie Johnson) and Michelle, fair Michelle (Ego Nwodim) – sing a song about how they “walk around the polls” because “it’s time to come down and have our voices heard”. As they touch each other in sync with the polling station, they find that it has been closed, just like the others in their neighborhood. So now they have to walk along an interstate highway to the polls, avoiding cars and cramping. And when they finally reach an open polling station, they are faced with a wait of several hours and a heavily armed Boogaloo Boy. “Strollin ‘” is both a wacky and cheesy song and a truly damning political satire about closing hundreds of polling stations in predominantly Black and Latin American communities to make voting less accessible to minorities (“I regret to live in Texas! ”) He skillfully underlines the hypocrisy of PSA messages from sunny voters (“ I’ve seen the ads, they need us! ”) who fails to recognize how much real infrastructure is depriving entire communities of their safe, free and easy participation in the electoral process. This is the most catchy song about voter suppression you’ve ever heard. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.
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