The goal of the contest, which has received coverage on Afghanistan's Tolo TV and financial support from organizations like the government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace (but not from the Afghan government), is to engage Afghanistan's youth, whose participation in elections has steadily declined since the country's 2004 presidential contest (as has voter turnout in general; 8 million Afghans voted in 2004, compared with fewer than 5 million in the contentious 2009 election). And young people are an absolutely critical demographic: a staggering seven in 10 Afghans are under the age of 25. But the challenges in mobilizing them go beyond overcoming apathy. They're being asked to choose a president from a field of unsavory, uninspiring warlords and government insiders, and to take part in an election that the Taliban has threatened to violently disrupt.

"All my Afghan friends think that the election's a joke—it's a bunch of warlords or, as they call them, 'mafia' who are running the whole thing, that it doesn't matter if they vote or not," Travis Beard, the primary organizer of the contest, told me. "What they need to see or be shown is that democracy ... is actually quite cool.... A lot of kids might actually go, 'Oh what the hell. I'll go ahead and vote and see what happens.'" Not all young people will be responsive to the campaign, he adds, noting that many don't listen to the kind of music he's promoting because of their Islamic faith. But some might.

The inspiration for the competition came from Rock the Vote in the U.S., says Beard, a globetrotting Australian who's been working to develop Afghanistan's music scene for seven years, in part through the annual Sound Central music festival in Kabul.

To drum up interest in the competition, Beard asked two Afghan rappers, Edris Bayan and Shekeb Yaaghi, to record tracks encouraging people to participate, and then plastered the promotional songs on radio and television. Contestants downloaded one of the pre-made rock, traditional, or fusion tracks on the website Sola.af, wrote lyrics in one of the country's two official languages, Pashto and Dari, to sing over the music, and then uploaded their recordings to the site (contestants couldn't mention specific political parties or candidates).

Bayan (whose video is above) rapped in Pashto about how voting is a "peace flag," and singing a "sword." Yaaghi (below) rapped in Dari about how voting is a right, a responsibility, and a means of ensuring the country's development.

Yaaghi, a 23-year-old studying computer science at the American University of Afghanistan, is part of a hip-hop group in Kabul called Hybrid Pharaohs that raps—mainly in English (rap doesn't sound good in Dari, he laments)—about tribal wars, political corruption, government suppression, and the need for national unity. He grew up in Herat in the 1990s during Taliban rule, and got interested in hip-hop by listening to CDs from the German synth-pop duo Modern Talking—music his uncle picked up for him during business trips to Pakistan since it was nowhere to be found under the Taliban. In 1998, Modern Talking came out with an album that featured a rapper in every song, and Yaaghi was hooked. Now that his election rap has run on a loop on TV, kids recognize him on the street. "Most of the time they ask me, 'Why don't you do a rap?' And then I have to do a rap," he told me.