Today, Steve Arrington shares a video for “Make a Difference,” from his new album Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions out now via Stones Throw.
Category: music
We Insist: A Century Of Black Music Against State Violence
Lil Baby performs during a Juneteenth voter registration rally on June 19, 2020 at Murphy Park Fairgrounds in Atlanta, Ga. One week earlier, he released “The Bigger Picture,” a song protesting police brutality.Paras Griffin/Getty Images
In the liner notes to John Coltrane’s 1964 album Live At Birdland, Amiri Baraka (then writing as Le Roi Jones) contemplated the gift the saxophonist and his band offered with this music inspired by the horrific deaths of four Black girls in a Birmingham church bombing inspired by white supremacist hatred. “Listen,” Baraka wrote. “What we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin [Jones], rising in the background like something out of nature… a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians’ feelings.” Baraka is describing the transformation in art of unfathomable pain, the human response to violence, into grace. Not transcendence or reconciliation – but grace, the honor of one presence, the ability to face injustice and remain whole and gain the energy to respond. That’s what Coltrane created in his landmark piece, which you’ll find in the middle of the list below, as part of a history that parallels American culture’s development: the story of Black American music and its response to oppression, and particularly, state-sanctioned violence.
In recent weeks, musicians have responded to the crowning of the Black Lives Matter movement as a central force motivating social change by writing new anthems, a remarkable new chapter in protest music. Listeners have connected creative leaps like Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” and Terrace Martin’s “Pig Feet” to the hip-hop classics that challenged police violence in the 1990s and beyond, and to singular historical works like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” The truth, though, is that the witnessing, coded or open warnings and encouragement and political dissent communicated through today’s urgent soundtrack characterize the whole of Black American music. From the oldest shout songs that surfaced on the Georgia coast to the spirituals that were revered after Emancipation, shared choruses documented brutality and exhorted people to resist. Jazz and blues songs that, to white listeners, seemed like good fun for dancing were news reports to those who knew how to listen. The civil rights movement codified hymns of resistance, but the soul and funk that poured from radios paid mind to police harassment and other threats too, sometimes more pointedly. There was never a moment, in fact, when Black musicians put aside their commitment to telling the truth of how Black people have been wronged, and survived, and fought back.
The 50 songs discussed in this list often describe specific acts of police violence but they are not limited to that subject. Together they construct a kind of timeline of an ongoing movement within American music, stretching back more than a century. It is meant to be revelatory but not complete. The songs here take on some of the ugliest stories with which America — and, since it goes international, the world — has to reckon. They mourn the dead and fight for the living. Some are easy to identify as protest songs; others feel like a party. Many address police violence directly decades before that subject became a lodestone in hip hop. Some of these songs have been misinterpreted even when their messages are perfectly clear. All contribute to the history of Black people showing what America’s official histories would hide in plain sight: the destructiveness of white supremacy and the uprisings against it that are not only organized and political, but personal. Like music itself, this spirit of resistance takes many shapes, but has never been silenced. As Baraka said of Coltrane, all you have to do is really listen.
Listen to the songs featured below on playlists via Spotify and Apple Music.
Billie Holiday in 1957.Bob Parent/Getty Images
1927–1963: Witness & Resistance
Sara Martin
“Georgia Stockade Blues”
(1927)
This Classic Blues from the period dominated by a woman named Ma and a number of Smiths is described by scholar Sarah Haley as, perhaps, “the definitive popular expression of the brutality of southern women’s imprisonment.” The turpentine farm that sets Martin’s scene highlights one of the numerous industries that took advantage of a captive and overwhelmingly Black labor pool in order to build modern infrastructure. The listener knows nothing of why she’s there; the only crime explicitly named is the crime of impoverishment (“They found me guilty without one dime”) that has forced her into shackles in a place without respite or mercy. —Shana L. RedmondArticle continues after sponsor message
Louis Armstrong
“I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead (You Rascal You)”
(1931)
Perhaps you’ve seen the egregious Betty Boop cartoon, wherein a high-flying Louis Armstrong gets conflated with a tribal savage on an African safari. One year earlier, Armstrong and his band had been thrown in jail for running afoul of Jim Crow in Memphis, released on bail with the condition that they play a benefit concert. In a gesture often cited as Exhibit A for Armstrong’s trickster reputation, that show featured a version of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead (You Rascal You)” — which Pops dedicated to the Memphis Police Department. —Nate Chinen
Ethel Waters
“Supper Time”
(1933)
One might not expect to find a musical revue number in this list, let alone one authored by Irving Berlin. It is both the profundity of the story behind the music and the subtleties of its performance that make it a study in anti-Black state violence. Written for Waters, the song tells the story of a woman struggling to reconcile her daily routine with the news that her husband has been lynched and “ain’t comin’ home no more.” Lynching was a pastime for some in the late 19th and 20th centuries that created its own rules of engagement. Citizens deputized themselves to enact what they considered to be justice, nearly always with the assistance, consent and collaboration of the local police who provided supplies, cover or intel for their mob murders. Families with children often attended, bringing lunches and posing for the photographs that became souvenirs along with bits of rope, tree or the victim’s body parts. Waters’ delivery of the song, full of painful lyrical articulation and gesture, shows the slow resignation to grief that the victim’s loved ones experience. Contemporary lynchings may appear differently but her feeling still speaks volumes. —Shana L. Redmond
Billie Holiday
“Strange Fruit”
(1939)
THROUGHLINE
Strange Fruit
The song, like the singer, is iconic — and the two have been inextricable nearly from the start. One of the most heralded protest anthems on record, “Strange Fruit” paints a chilling portrait of a southern lynching, using language both lyrically formal and brutally direct. First published as a poem by Abel Meeropol, who’d been horrified by a photograph of a lynching in 1930, the song circulated widely in New York leftist circles before it found its way to Billie Holiday. Her early performances of “Strange Fruit,” during an engagement at Café Society in Greenwich Village, were an instant sensation. (“She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation,” recalled Meeropol, “which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere.”) Because her label, Columbia Records, balked at releasing such charged material, Holiday recorded it as a single for Commodore, a couple of weeks after she turned 24. Backed by Frankie Newton’s Café Society Band, which sets the stage with a mournful fanfare, Holiday sings carefully, in a troubled calm. Her composure is critical, enacting both a plea to empathy and a confrontation with ugly truth: When she curls her voice around “the sudden smell of burning flesh,” it’s a moment made all the ghastlier for its intimacy. Subsequent versions of “Strange Fruit” — by everyone from Nina Simone to Jeff Buckley to Bettye LaVette — would mostly hew to a declarative mode. But Billie still haunts the song, as it haunted her. —Nate Chinen
Vera Hall
“Another Man Done Gone”
(1940)
The mid-20th century field recordings John and Alan Lomax collected became a cornerstone of the folk revival, but they are not infinitely mutable texts. Many reveal the maps and codes that Black rural Southerners created to survive the nation’s ongoing betrayal. This one, shared by the father-and-son duo’s favorite singer, Alabama native Vera Hall, bears witness to the destruction wrought by the carceral system built to contain Black Americans after emancipation. Hall’s spare verses describe a man who – escapes? is killed? — while on a chain gang, one of the mobile prisons designed shortly after emancipation to contain and terrorize free Black people. John Lomax heard something in Hall’s woeful tone, or perhaps in her unrecorded conversation, that prompted him to play “Another Man Done Gone” in 1937 at the 75th anniversary commemoration of the the Emancipation Proclamation’s signing.
Later singers filled in the lines of Vera Hall’s cipher. Johnny Cash, who heard the song interpolated with the voices of witnesses to lynchings on Alan Lomax’s 1957 compilation Blues in the Mississippi Night, added the phrase “they hung him on a tree.” Folk revival originator Odetta also made state violence explicit in her version, changing Hall’s phrase “he killed another man” to the state-implicating “they killed another man.” The song became an emblem of institutionalized violence, used by poets, novelist and activists to demonstrate brutality’s dull repetitiveness. “There is all the pathos of the world poured into a few words,” an Ebony magazine op-ed on the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. declared in 1968, invoking the song. “No one is exempt.” —Ann Powers
Leadbelly
“Duncan and Brady”
(1947)
Outlaw stories far precede 1990s rap in American music, and often document resistance to police brutality. The novelist Cecil Brown, among other scholars, connects the most famous of all — that of Stagolee, the 19th-century father of Superfly and Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” — to this lineage. The Stagolee ballads emerged alongside more explicit accounts of self-defense killings of police, including this one, relaying the story of a Black bartender defending himself against a St. Louis officer intending to “shoot somebody just to see him die.” (The actual Brady case was more complicated, and led to the first time a Black lawyer argued a case in the Supreme Court, though Walter Moran Farmer failed to exonerate the possibly innocent Harry Duncan.) When Lead Belly incorporated the song into the repertoire he mostly performed for white audiences after John Lomax brought him to New York, he performed it with cutting sarcasm, apparently recognizing that this was a chance to note the real threat Black Americans faced amidst what some listeners took as tall tales. —Ann Powers
Louis Jordan
“Saturday Night Fish Fry”
(1949)
Social gatherings have historically offered more than just fun for Black Americans. The rent parties of Harlem, Midwestern “buffet flats” and fish fries of New Orleans provided ways ways to feed the community, pass the hat and gather rent, create informal business networks and, for artists, perfect the music that might eventually bring them fame. These temporary autonomous zones — which have, at times, welcomed the low-level illegal activities dubbed “vice,” like sex work and drug use — are routinely disrupted by police, who often use deadly force. Songs like Fats Waller’s “The Joint is Jumpin'” and Hot Lips Page’s “They Raided the Joint” turn these dangerous encounters into comedy, as does this classic by Louis Jordan — a song some call the first rock and roll record. Jordan’s account of a rollicking good time abruptly takes a turn when he’s punched in the face by an officer, hustled into a “Black Maria” (or police wagon) and dumped in jail. Jordan’s arch delivery belies the detailed account of the pain police induced in partygoers. In the song, Jordan is bailed out by his girlfriend; “Saturday Night Fish Fry” ruled the R&B charts for twelve weeks and made clear that however much the state tried to regulate the creative expression people generated a the parties, the joints would keep jumpin’ anyway. —Ann Powers
Alex Foster & Michel Larue
“Follow the Drinking Gourd”
(1958)
Little is known about the group that released an album named after this song in 1958 — later reissued as American Negro Slave Songs — except that they were folklore collectors and they once rented the Greenwich Village club the Gate of Horn to perform this repertoire. The story of Black performers in the folk revival still begs to be thoroughly told. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” has been classified as a spiritual, but its meaning is very much of this world — it was meant to instruct people fleeing their enslavers to read constellations like the Big Dipper to map their way to freedom. Foster and LaRue’s interpretation in modern and evocative, conjuring the night that offered some hope of protection on such perilous paths. Its menace keeps alive the original spirit of a song that today is often defused and redefined as children’s music. —Ann Powers
Lord Commander
“No Crime, No Law”
(1959)
The 1950s launched a global Calypso craze, yet commercial success did not surrender the political content of this famed Caribbean musical genre. One of a number of Calypso Lords from Trinidad and Tobago, Lord Commander used the documentary nature of this dance music to tell the story of the fat cat colonial police officers, lawyers and magistrates who, he says, should be kissing the criminals who keep them well paid. —Shana L. Redmond
Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach
“Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace”
(1960)
“Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1964, for an essay commissioned by the Berlin Jazz Festival. He was referring to the music made by Black musicians in America, commonly known as jazz — and while he didn’t name specific artists, it’s no stretch to suggest Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln were rattling somewhere in his mind. We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite was released four years earlier, in 1960. Its cover shows a black-and-white image of a lunch-counter sit in. Featuring music by Roach and lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr., it’s a concept album in every sense, connecting the bitter legacy of American slavery with the push for freedom in South Africa. “Triptych: Prayer / Protest / Peace” is the album’s striking centerpiece, a rolling tone poem with Lincoln’s wordless vocals out front. In the first section, her incantatory moan evokes both a field holler and the cry of the church; during the final stretch, she sounds spent and becalmed. But the crux of the matter is “Protest,” in which Roach rains a hail of blows on his snare and toms while Lincoln screams and howls: a cathartic, unsparing embodiment of righteous fury. Sixty years later, it rages on. —Nate Chinen
John Coltrane
“Alabama”
(1963)
On Sept. 15, 1963, four young Black girls were killed by a bomb at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala. Two months later, saxophonist John Coltrane recorded “Alabama,” whose dirge-like cadence was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King’s oration at the girls’ funeral service. The soft rumble of McCoy Tyner’s piano and the ceremonial thrum of Elvin Jones’ toms deepen the gravity of a song that frames protest in terms of a human toll, devastating and irretrievable. —Nate Chinen
Stevie Wonder in 1975.Evening Standard/Getty Images
1967–1985: Black Power
The Equals
“Police on My Back”
(1967)
After years of effort by Black immigrants in England to rebuild the nation post-World War II, British policy makers in the 1950s and 1960s thanked them with immigration restriction laws as well as housing and employment discrimination, all of which was enforced with assistance from police. The repetitive pop melody of “Police on My Back” mirrors the repetition of police harassment experienced by the singer Eddy Grant, himself an immigrant from Guyana. The passive voice statement that “there was a shooting” offers an oblique reference but no clear justification for the police pursuit that sends him on a sprint via street and railway every day of the week. —Shana L. Redmond
The Lumpen
“No More”
(1970)
The Lumpen was a little-known soul/funk band formed amongst active Black Panther Party members. Inspired by the example of fellow Party member Elaine Brown, who recorded the 1969 protest album Seize The Time, The Lumpen meant to “use popular forms of music that the community could relate to and politicize it so it would function as another weapon in the struggle for liberation.” The Black Panthers were founded with a 10 point program, one of which was “an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people” and this core tenet is at the heart of the group’s sole single. One side, “Free Bobby Now,” was a contemporary funk tune devoted to Party co-founder Bobby Seale, at the time imprisoned on contempt charges and a cause celebre for activists around the world. The other side, “No More,” was performed in a more traditional spiritual style, with lyrics written by Lumpen member Bill Calhoun decrying state oppression “from Watts to Brownsville” but envisioning a future free of “pigs on our streets and poverty.” —Oliver Wang
Marvin Gaye
“Inner City Blues” & “What’s Going On”
(1971)
Despite the well-publicized examples of police violence against the Black community through the ’60s and early ’70s, a star of Marvin Gaye’s stature could ill risk writing an entire song dedicated to the topic. However, on his best-selling, era-defining What’s Going On, from 1971, Gaye still found ways to call out the police on two of the LP’s biggest hits. On “Inner City Blues,” “trigger happy policing” is one of the dozens of laments he lists, alongside rising crime rates and falling wages. Likewise on the title track, his line “picket lines and picket signs / don’t punish me with brutality,” can’t be read as anything but a commentary on how civil rights-era law enforcement often responded to nonviolent protests with swinging batons or worse. —Oliver Wang
Gil Scott-Heron
“No Knock”
(1972)
This “no knockin’, head-rockin’, inter-shockin'” poem by the “Godfather of rap” speaks as clearly and as devastatingly today as on the date of its release. No-knock warrants permit law enforcement officers to forcibly enter a property without announcement. A no-knock warrant was issued for the home of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville woman killed in her home by police on March 13, 2020. A no-knock warrant was served on the home in which 7-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones slept in the minutes before her 2010 murder by a Detroit police officer. There was also Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta; before her Alberta Spruill in New York. And as Scott-Heron says, the cops “no knocked on [his] brother,” the revolutionary and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, assassinating him in 1969. —Shana L. Redmond
Archie Shepp
“Attica Blues”
(1972)
Several months after the Attica Prison uprising met its infamous and bloody end, saxophonist Archie Shepp made Attica Blues — a teeming, unwieldy concept album bound by searing moral clarity. Its strength assumes many forms, but none more arresting than the title track, a gnarly funk invocation with urgent singing by Carl Hall. “I got a feeling that something ain’t going right!” he cries. “And I’m worried ’bout the human soul!” —Nate Chinen
Stevie Wonder
“Living For The City”
(1973)
In her book about black radicalism in Oakland, named after this 1973 epic, historian Donna Jean Murch quotes Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton, who himself was imprisoned and then exonerated of shooting a police officer in 1967, about the police presence in his city: “The police … were really the government.” Wonder’s song draws that bottom line. It’s a terrifying inversion of the all-American Horatio Alger story, in which an impoverished boy from “hard time Mississippi” heads to the urban mecca to make something of himself. Instead, as the song’s climactic spoken-word interlude portrays, he’s quickly set up for a petty crime and nabbed by law enforcement. Anyone who’s seen the clusters of blue uniforms on any major city’s downtown street corners may get a chill from the rapidity in which our hero becomes a victim of circumstance — and of racism. The words that greet Wonder’s protagonist upon arrest — “get in that cell, N*****” – became a key sample in hip-hop, employed by artists from Public Enemy to Slick Rick. —Ann Powers
War
“Me and Baby Brother”
(1973)
As with other popular soul-era artists such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the multiracial Long Beach group War found ways to subtly speak on police brutality. The snappy funk track “Me and Baby Brother,” featured on the group’s 1973 LP Deliver the Word, is ostensibly about reminiscing on days spent hanging with “baby brother” on street corners and “drinking funky wine” until the song hits the bridge and a chilling line appears: “hang on, baby brother / Oh, they call it law and order.” The main hook — “come back baby brother” — returns immediately, but it’s easy to mishear it as “shot my baby brother.” Years later, on War co-founder Lonnie Jordan’s 2007 album War Stories, the version of “Baby Brother” is updated and Jordan now sings, explicitly: “They shot my baby brother, back in 1971 with bombs and guns, and they called it law and order.” —Oliver Wang
Sweet Honey in the Rock
“Joanne Little”
(1976)
Beginning with the defiant and repeated line, “Who is this girl and what is she to you,” this song tells the story of Joan (pronounced Jo-ann) Little, a Black woman who, while being held in a North Carolina men’s jail in 1974, murdered a guard in self-defense against sexual assault. Her eventual trial drew the attention of prison abolitionists and women’s and civil rights organizations, as well as the high-profile support of Angela Y. Davis. Led by the voice of movement artist Bernice Johnson Reagon, the song by Black women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock gives Little full dimension and answers the recurring question by naming her our sister, mama, lover and “the woman who’s gonna carry your child.” —Shana L. Redmond
Fela Kuti
“Sorrow, Tears & Blood”
(1977)
In 1977, Fela Kuti’s creative compound, Kalakuta Republic, was raided and burned to the ground by Nigerian military in retaliation for his political beliefs and public critiques of the government and its military. Kuti, his band and guests were beaten, and his mother thrown from a window, which caused fatal injuries. Instead of silence, he returned with his band Africa 70 to the studio and in 1977 produced a series of albums, including Sorrow Tears and Blood, which, true to form, announces the police and military as the murderers who create a culture of fear and confusion that forces people to “scatter scatter.” —Shana L. Redmond
Rick James
“Mr. Policeman”
(1981)
Funk popularizer James was notorious for being a self-proclaimed Superfreak, and his hits remain party mix staples. But his most successful album – and its cover — showed that he could be a protest artist, too. Inspired by the police shooting of an unarmed friend in his native Buffalo, James wrote a direct and incendiary lyric: “It’s a shame, it’s a disgrace, why every time you show your face somebody dies, man.” He set it to a reggae rhythm in tribute to the 1972 Jamaican film classic The Harder They Come, in which Jimmy Cliff plays a social outsider eventually killed by police. And he styled the iconic Street Songs cover to bring the song to visual life: On the front, James leans against a streetlight as two women in the background struggle in handcuffs, led away by a shadowy lieutenant. On the back cover he’s being frisked by the same officer. This twist on the ubiquitous early-1970s romanticization of the pimp in blaxploitation films and music shows that no matter how freaky, an urban hustler could not escape routine police harassment. —Ann Powers
Nina Simone
“I Was Just A Stupid Dog To Them”
(1982)
The obvious choice would be “Mississippi Goddam,” which responds to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, among other outrages during the thick of the civil rights movement. But Nina Simone held her anger close in the years to come, well after expatriating to Europe. On this misleadingly jaunty tune, a staple of her repertoire in the ’80s, she recalls the death of Bob Marley and the dehumanizing treatment that still plagued her, along with a vow: “Now everything will change.” —Nate Chinen
McIntosh County Shouters
“Wade the Water to My Knees”
(1983)
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the stories of violence against Black people in America, preserved in music, are as old as the nation itself. This song is a variant of the familiar spiritual “Wade in the Water,” but its roots run even deeper, into the silty banks of Dunbar Creek at St. Simons Island, Ga. There, in 1803, a group of West Africans transported in the Middle Passage revolted at the end of their journey; both history and legend assert that they drowned themselves rather than remain captive. Such narratives were often buried between the lines of the spirituals and shout songs that form the foundation of African-American music. In the past half-century, musical preservationists like Georgia Sea Islands group have revived the original meanings of these songs, reminding listeners that their messages are not piously universal, but hauntingly particular. —Ann Powers
Wynton Marsalis
“Black Codes”
(1985)
Trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis was not yet the institutional figurehead he’d become when he made Black Codes (From the Underground) in 1985, featuring his brother Branford on saxophone along with a fearsome rhythm section. The album’s title invokes laws in the postbellum South that prevented former slaves from exercising their freedoms. Wynton’s slashing horn, and the band’s muscular prowess, stand united in proud rebuke. —Nate Chinen
Lauryn Hill in 2001.Scott Gries/Getty Images
1985–2012: Policing & Protest
Toddy Tee
“Batterram”
(1985)
Of the long list of decisions made by the LAPD during the reign of now-disgraced former chief Daryl Gates, few were as notorious — and embarrassing — as their construction of a six-ton tank tipped with a 14-foot battering ram. The idea was that the vehicle, officially dubbed a “batterrram,” could be used in hostage situations or drug raids by busting through building walls; the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton dramatizes this in its opening scene. Produced by soul legend Leon Haywood, the 1985 single, “Batterram,” features Compton rapper Toddy Tee warning listeners, “the Chief of Police says he just might / flatten out every house he sees on sight.” Compared with later songs by L.A. rappers, “Batterram” is almost playful in tone, but it was an early example of local artists reacting to overuse of force by the LAPD. After only a handful of deployments, a cavalcade of lawsuits and civic outrage forced Gates to mothball the assault vehicle. —Oliver Wang
N.W.A.
“F*** Tha Police”
(1988)
Arguably the most blatant protest song in hip-hop, 1988’s “F*** Tha Police” left absolutely nothing to the imagination and spoke bluntly to the fractured police/community relations of inner-city Los Angeles. The song not only struck a nerve with countless Black youth in cities nationwide, it caught the attention of the FBI, whose displeasure with the record was documented and sent to the group’s record label. Unfortunately, the song’s relevance hasn’t subdued; over the years it has been remade and re-recorded many times over, most recently by rapper YG during this year’s protest. —Bobby Carter
Tracy Chapman
“Across the Lines”
(1988)
The shooting of Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through a Georgia subdivision brought into stark relief the threats facing Black Americans when they venture into neighborhoods where they are perceived as strangers. Segregation is one of the most powerful state-imposed reinforcements of American racism, living on informally (and, sometimes, illegally) long after it was supposedly abolished by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Tracy Chapman, born poor in Cleveland in 1965, paid witness as a child to the ways in which poorly enforced integration led to violence against Black citizens in their own neighborhoods. Chapman, whose universe expanded when she received a scholarship to a Connecticut boarding school, brought her political perspective and personal experience of being bullied as a child to her work as a rare Black singer-songwriter in the informally segregated folk-rock scene of the 1990s. This song cries out for all lines to be eradicated even as it contends with the reality that most Americans choose sides, forcing others to run for their lives. —Ann Powers
Public Enemy
“Anti-N***** Machine”
(1990)
New York’s Public Enemy first introduced the phrase “anti-n***** machine” on its 1988 song “Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos,” which was a modern-day “Attica Blues,” speaking on the American prison system. On the 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet, Chuck D and his group turned the phrase into a short, 90 second song where the “machine” represents the government and justice systems, implicating policy makers and police alike. That said, Chuck’s most direct barbs are aimed at law enforcement, especially in the song’s second verse: “went to Cali, a rally was for a brother’s death. It was the fuzz who shot him and not the bloods or cuzz.” It was a prescient line, predicting the L.A. gang truce of 1992. On the album, “Anti-N***** Machine” led directly into the next song, “Burn Hollywood Burn,” thus connecting anti-Black racism in law enforcement with racist imagery in popular media. —Oliver Wang
Main Source
“Just a Friendly Game of Baseball”
(1991)
Lead by Queens rapper/producer Large Professor, Main Source turned in one of the more creative early-’90s rap songs about police violence by comparing it to the national pastime: “To the cops, shooting brothers is like playing baseball, and they’re never in a slump. I guess when they shoot up a crew, it’s a grand slam, and when it’s one, it’s a home run.” The group squeezes as much as they can from the analogy over three verses, with corrupt government officials being called umpires and the dugout a metaphor for the graves that victims were sent to after being “gunned down” by an outfielder with a badge and firearm. The song, originally released on the group’s 1991 Breaking Atoms LP, made such an impression that its remix was one of the only songs by an East Coast artist included on the otherwise West Coast-centric Boyz n the Hood soundtrack. —Oliver Wang
Body Count
“Cop Killer”
(1992)
Few songs have sparked as much controversy as “Cop Killer,” released on the self-titled debut by the rap/rock group Body Count in the spring of 1992. Originally written in 1990, “Cop Killer” found the group’s lead, L.A. rapper Ice-T, taking a preemptive “kill or be killed” approach to police violence: “Cop killer, better you than me. Cop killer, f*** police brutality.” The song mentioned both LAPD chief Daryl Gates and beating victim Rodney King; its release came barely a month before the King verdict would ignite protests and riots across the U.S.
Police associations, already reeling from criticism, attempted to deflect attention onto “Cop Killer” instead, arguing that its threats to “dust some cops off” put police lives in danger. They demanded that parent company Time Warner retract the Warner Music release and pressured stores to remove it from shelves. The protest went all the way up to the White House, with both Vice President Dan Quayle and President George H.W. Bush castigating the song as well. “Cop Killer” ignited a fierce free speech debate around censorship and though Warner Bros. refused to pull the album, in the end, Ice T made the decision to remove the song from future versions of the album and he eventually broke from the label out of disappointment with Time Warner’s handling of the situation. —Oliver Wang
Rage Against The Machine
“Killing In the Name”
(1992)
“Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses,” snarled Zack de la Rocha in the first verse of this oracular explosion from L.A. rock band Rage Against the Machine. The line laid bare a long historical connection between law enforcement and racist hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan — more recently the subject of lengthy FBI investigations. And it announced a new leader in political rock. Radical and unafraid of censure, bursting forth in the moment when the riots following Rodney King’s assault by police had ripped Los Angeles apart, Rage brought the confrontational spirit of both punk and hip-hop to a genre that had grown decadent. The band was denounced as a “hate group” by some but inspired a new generation to scream its protest. —Ann Powers
Ice Cube
“Who Got the Camera”
(1992)
Ice Cube stands as one of the one of architects of hip-hop protest, and has always delivered a message from the perspective of the oppressed. “Who Got The Camera” rings disturbingly relevant, thanks to the sheer volume of police brutality incidents that have been caught on film over the past few years. —Bobby Carter
KRS-One
“Sound of da Police”
(1993)
While the term “racial profiling” wasn’t as prevalent in 1993 as it is today, KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police” is a textbook breakdown of what it means to be targeted by law enforcement as Black person in America. “The Teacha” masterfully deciphers this relationship, likening it to that of the slave and the overseer in his signature Jamaican patois. —Bobby Carter
Queen Latifah
“Just Another Day…”
(1993)
A love song to the New Jersey neighborhoods that raised her, “Just Another Day…” reveals a Queen without her title as she’s “just plain old Dana today.” Similar to the scenes of Black life popularized in the late 1980s and 1990s by filmmakers Spike Lee and John Singleton, Latifah focusses on street-level interactions and relationships. In them she sees the complicated beauty of her ‘hood where, in spite of daily witnessing violence at the hands of neighbors and police, she can also sing and play. —Shana L. Redmond
Michael Jackson
“They Don’t Care About Us”
(1996)
Released on Jackson’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1, “They Don’t Care About Us” was a rare unabashed protest song from the King of Pop, albeit a muddled one. On it, Jackson tries to compare (and conflate) his own legal woes, dealing with accusations and investigations of alleged pedophilia, with a larger commentary on human rights struggles happening globally. “I am the victim of police brutality, now, I’m tired of being the victim of hate,” he sings and on one of the two Spike Lee-directed music videos made for the song, we see images of the Rodney King beating cut into a video mostly set inside a prison where Jackson is dressed in county blues. The other video, shot in a Rio de Janeiro favela, doesn’t reference the prison system but it does include several pointed scenes of Jackson standing defiantly next to uniformed Brazilian police officers. While some previous songs, most notably “Black Or White,” addressed race, “They Don’t Care About Us” was Jackson’s most strident song about racism. It was a stark departure from his chart-topping pop persona to hear him sing lines such as, “Black male, blackmail, throw the brother in jail.” Ironically, the song’s underlying anti-racism message was undermined by criticism that some of his lyrics —”Jew me, sue me, everybody do me” — were anti-Semitic. Jackson issued several public apologies in response. —Oliver Wang
Lauryn Hill
“Forgive Them Father”
(1998)
Songs are open-ended things, their meanings adaptable to new historical moments, making necessary responses. Hill wrote this song as an invocation of Bob Marley’s spirit, interpolating the Wailers’ “Concrete Jungle” into her litany of call-outs that range from thoughtless men to capitalism itself. In recent years, however, she has made the message more pointed by extending the song’s ending in her performances and showing a montage of phone- and videocamera- captured incidents of police brutality as she sings. The song becomes a form of sanctified dissent, a cry for reconciliation and reparations, communicating compassion even as it unwaveringly seeks justice. —Ann Powers
Hip Hop For Respect
“A Tree Never Grown“
(2000)
In February of 1999, four plain-clothed NYPD officers in the Bronx shot and killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea, mistaking his wallet for a gun. Infamously, they fired 41 shots at Diallo — that number became a shorthand for the excesses of police force. Diallo’s killing and the subsequent acquittal of all four officers drew widespread condemnation and sparked dozens of musical response, including a project from the 41 rappers who comprised the Hip Hop For Respect project, assembled by Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Their 2000 EP included “A Tree Never Grows,” its title a mournful commentary on what was lost with Diallo’s death. On the song’s hook, Mos Def sings of Diallo’s mother: “As the coffin had closed, committed to the earth below, first seed she had sewn, would be a tree never grown.” —Oliver Wang
Gregory Porter
“1960 What?”
(2010)
Led and grounded by upright bass, Porter’s deceptively powerful question—”1960 What?”—refuses the narrative of exceptional or isolated incidences of violence as he sings into one deadly genealogy the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the murder by police of a young man carrying “three pieces of black licorice.” —Shana L. Redmond
Esperanza Spalding
“Land of the Free”
(2012)
As a bassist and composer, Esperanza Spalding makes a virtue out of virtuosity; as a singer-songwriter, she often bends her ebullience toward a pointed aim. “Land of the Free,” a secular hymn from her 2012 album Radio Music Society, tells the tale of Cornelius Dupree, Jr., who spent 30 years imprisoned on a wrongful charge. From this particular miscarriage of justice, she draws a circle wide enough to implicate our entire society. The song ends with a pause where you’d expect to hear the word “free,” followed by the slamming of a cell door. —Nate Chinen
Ambrose Akinmusire in 2011.Eva Hambach/Getty Images
2014–2020: Black Lives Matter
Vince Staples
“Hands Up”
(2014)
About a month after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Vince Staples released “Hands Up,” which became a rallying cry for the protests that followed. Over a manic instrumental, the Long Beach rapper delivers furious bars, mostly focused on the corruption within various Los Angeles law enforcement divisions. The parallels between his personal experiences and the ones reported across the globe are undeniable. —Bobby Carter
Ambrose Akinmusire
“Rollcall for Those Absent”
(2014)
The haunting drone of a Mellotron has a near-liturgical quality as it supports the voice of a young child reading the names of dozens of men, women and children murdered by police and vigilantes. More than once, the voice lingers in repetition of the name Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager whose 2012 murder by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida elicited widespread outrage, public memorials and a personal statement from President Obama. —Shana L. Redmond
Kendrick Lamar
“The Blacker the Berry”
(2015)
Not long after the release of To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, Lamar’s “Alright” was adopted as a protest chant across the U.S., beginning in Cleveland among activists rallying against the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by officer Timothy Loehmann. However, the song’s more incendiary sibling was “The Blacker the Berry,” which found Lamar defiantly excoriating anti-Blackness in all its forms: “This plot is bigger than me: It’s generational hatred, it’s genocism.” The rapper had previously taken heat for his views on the role of personal accountability in confronting violence within Black communities. Though most of “The Blacker the Berry” is directed at white supremacy, his last lines reignited the debate: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me?” —Oliver Wang
Georgia Anne Muldrow
“Blam”
(2018)
Even under assault, generations of oppressed people have done much more than simply survive, or even fight back. They have flourished, nurturing the roots that others would upend. The funky, hypnotically soulful music of Georgia Anne Muldrow evokes the beloved neighborhoods, community circles and cultural hubs that many commenters celebrate when they say the phrase, “I love us.” This song is a call to the battlefield of an “ancient war” – the same one that took out Tulsa’s Greenwood district in 1921, put an interstate through North Nashville in 1968 and bombed Philadelphia’s Cobbs Creek neighborhood in 1985. Muldrow’s groove is steady, the mood she raises coolly defiant, as she leads the chorus: “Before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.” —Ann Powers
Jorja Smith
“Blue Lights”
(2018)
TINY DESK
Jorja Smith: Tiny Desk Concert
Before she had even released an LP, the British singer-songwriter took a stand with “Blue Lights.” The song is an ode to the Black men of her hometown in the West Midlands of England, who fear the mere sight of those lights in the city. —Bobby Carter
Our Native Daughters
“Mama’s Cryin’ Long”
(2018)
Today’s movement seemed to erupt from the streets themselves, propelled by the rapid-fire distribution of horrifying images across social media. Yet diligent work by artists, journalists and historians has also played a role in shifting American consciousness. The novels of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, the films of Steve McQueen and Ava DuVernay, the music of Dom Flemons and Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the massive, historically grounded 1619 Project led by Nikole Hannah-Jones at The New York Times – as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit musical Hamilton – have all helped make the buried or overlooked lineage of resistance feel visceral. Rhiannon Giddens has been a leader in these endeavors. On her own albums and with the quartet Our Native Daughters, Giddens has opened herself fearlessly to be inhabited by the stricken spirits of the women who suffered and fought against their own objectification and confinement on the block, in the fields and on the run throughout America. This harrowing song employing call and response and the rhythms of the diaspora is a powerful example — Giddens sings as a child witnessing her mother’s personal revolt against a rapacious enslaver, and that mother’s death. Heartbreakingly beautiful work like this motivates and sustains. —Ann Powers
Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science feat. Malcolm Jamal Warner
“Bells (Ring Loudly)”
(2019)
TINY DESK
Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science: Tiny Desk Concert
Social Science, the improvising collective fronted by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, tackled a welter of issues on its 2019 album Waiting Game. The most visceral of them inspired this track, composed in the wake of Philando Castile’s killing by a police officer during a traffic stop in 2016. Debo Ray sings the heartbreaking chorus, while Malcolm-Jamal Warner intones an indictment: “Blue lives try to play Picasso / By splattering red on canvases of brown skin / As if Black lives mattering is a game to them / And not a basic right within.” —Nate Chinen
Rapsody
“Nina”
(2019)
Featured on the 2019 album Eve, “Nina” opens with the piercing voice of namesake Nina Simone, singing her rendition of “Strange Fruit.” Rapsody’s opening line is a reminder of the specter of violence that haunts Black lives: “Emit light, rap, or Emmett Till,” referring to the 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955. However, “Nina” is ultimately a song about resistance in the face of turmoil, especially by Black women: “Failed to kill me, it’s still me, woke up singing Shirley Murdock / As we lay these edges down, brown women, we so perfect.” —Oliver Wang
Terrace Martin
“Pig Feet”
(2020)
One of the first songs to emerge in the wake of national protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, “Pig Feet” is a furious, frenetic composition by jazz artist Terrace Martin that features rappers Denzel Curry and Daylyt and saxophonist Kamasi Washington, plus cameos from G Perico and Britney Thomas. Curry opens his verse pulling no punches: “Helicopters over my balcony / If the police can’t harass, they wanna smoke every ounce of me.” The music video is no less impactful, built from footage of recent protests and violent police responses against them. The song itself lasts roughly three minutes, but the remainder of the nearly five minute video is given over to a slow, sickening crawl of hundreds of names of Black people killed by the police. This portion passes in silence, yet it speaks with a deafening volume. —Oliver Wang
Lil Baby
“The Bigger Picture”
(2020)
ALL SONGS CONSIDERED
Heat Check: Bigger Picture
Lil Baby invites us into his consciousness and vividly illustrates the complexities of what it means to be a young Black man in America in 2020. The Atlanta MC struggles with fear for his life, his family and his community at the hands of law enforcement, but brilliantly incorporates messages of hope and resilience. It’s as powerful a protest song as any we’ve heard in decades past. —Bobby Carter
Leon Bridges
“Sweeter”
(2020)
Sweet is not the word most would use to describe our contemporary moment, but for soul singer Bridges, it’s a future worth hoping for. Written in 2019, “Sweeter” feels just as revelatory in 2020, linking the past and present in tragic continuity. With Terrace Martin lending his talents on saxophone, Bridges sings of the terrors of persistent violence against Black communities who, nonetheless, extend care to one another through tears and song. —Shana L. Redmond
https://open.spotify.com/embed?uri=spotify%3Aplaylist%3A4CZwLjIQnLtMT0gJQGM1lC
When It Comes Down – spiritchild
See rare footage of Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy jamming onstage
Jimi is in awe of his blues idol in 1968 – but are they joined by Roy Buchanan too?
The video quality is certainly not good but the talent onstage is undeniable; above is rare footage of Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy onstage in 1968.
American Blues Scene originally posted the clip to YouTube several years ago and claims the onstage jam is from 1968.
It starts with Guy performing Stormy Monday with his band, with Hendrix watching his idol near the front of the stage. The footage then cuts to Hendrix joining Buddy Guy onstage with a lefty Strat.
From then on it’s a loose funky jam session that finds Guy breaking a string and after allowing everyone to take a solo ahead of him (including the bass player), Hendrix takes flight with a solo at 9:41.
But between 6:26 and 8:19 an unnamed player is taking the lead – could it be the late Roy Buchanan?
If so that’s three guitar legends on the stage!
FEEL THE FURY OF BLACK PANTERA’S “I CAN’T BREATHE”
source:By Nathan Leigh
“Call the police for the police
Stop killing my people on these streets”
Brazilian crossover thrash trio Black Pantera have made raging against white supremacy into a finely honed artform, so it’s no surprise they’d have the perfect song for this moment. Their latest, like their best songs is stripped down, direct, and full of righteous fire. “I Can’t Breathe” rises from a plea to a threat, as the de Gama brothers build from a minimalist sludgy riff to a full-throttle hardcore assault. The video by Leonardo Ramalho like the song is straight and to the point. This is not the time for mincing words, and Black Pantera’s latest is a call to action.
BODY COUNT PULLS NO PUNCHES ON “POINT THE FINGER”
Ice-T is not fucking around. The legendary performer had just dropped his long-running hardcore band’s Carnivore album and was slated to embark on a world tour before the pandemic hit. Though those plans have changed, he and the rest of Body Count are still finding ways to get the word out. The video for “Point The Finger” finds the band going full DIY, filming everything from home. The track’s indictment of police violence is enhanced by its minimalism; there are no frills, no bullshit, just pure undiluted classic hardcore. Opening with a somber message from the man himself, the track finds Body Count sounding the tightest they have in years. Ice-T is always at his best when railing against the racism, violence, and hypocrisy of the system, and “Point The Finger” feels ever more timely in light of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. This is the real shit.
Grab your copy of Carnivore (which also features the band’s fan-fucking-tastic cover of “Ace of Spades”) here and catch more from Body Count on Instagram @bodycountofficial.
source: https://afropunk.com/2020/05/body-count-pulls-no-punches-on-point-the-finger/
Don’t Shoot (Single) by Amerigo Gazaway
Don’t Shoot (Single) by Amerigo Gazaway
Lyrics
Verse 1:
Some cops will try to act like they own you
They confiscating cameras and they snatchin’ up phones too
Harass and teargas you, so don’t get to close to ‘em
Here to “protect and serve”, yeah that’s not what these folks doin’
Cuz right now, ain’t no justice for Mike Browns
In white towns and they just expect us to pipe down
I’m like “wow”, these motherf*uckers gotta lotta nerve
Asked what the officer’s name was, but not a word
Day two, as the crisis ensues
And the right wing news tries to divide us in two
Let’s have a moment of silence, no more violence
And if you’re just finding out about it, open your eyelids
Don’t shoot, cuz it’s still happening all around us
Surrounded, I’m trying to stay calm but my heart is poundin’
Bad boys, bad boys in blue
Whatcha gonna do when someone points them toys at you
Hook:
Don’t shoot, for those of you who share my world view
Don’t shoot, just turn on the news if you want proof
Don’t shoot, no limit to what they gon’ do
Swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but the truth
Don’t shoot
Hands up, don’t shoot x2
I’m begging you don’t shoot
Hands up, don’t shoot x 2
Swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but the truth
Don’t shoot
Verse 2:
But it isn’t just the cops, it’s bigger than hip-hop
It’s propaganda and hatred perpetuated by Fox
It makes me sick to my stomach it’s devastating to watch
But if we remain complacent the cycle just never stops
It’s isn’t just viral videos flashing up on your screen
The revolution will not be your hashtags and memes
It ain’t a war on terror, it’s war against black teens
Obama, Dr. King, black culture and black dreams
Population control, withholding (Ebola/Corona) vaccines
And the CIA distributing dope to crack fiends
While the 1% is still in control of the cash streams
In the “land of the free” but what exactly does that mean?
And it isn’t just on twitter it’s happing in the streets
It’s happing int he church, it could happen to you or me
It’s happening everywhere but how much do we really care?
Is it enough to stand up and say something or sit and stare
At the share button, just acting like we don’t hear nothin’
Folks is out here killing for sport, like the was deer-huntin’
I know you hear me screaming at the top of my lungs
And I know you can understand me, I’m not speaking native tongues
Don’t shoot, cuz Momma said to never play with guns
But Uncle Sam said the he would loan me his just for fun
It ain’t a .38 Special but it get’s the job done
You can sign on the dotted line if you wanna “cop” one
Hook:
Don’t shoot, cuz yo, they got snipers on the roof
Don’t shoot, just turn on the news if you want proof
Don’t shoot, no limit to what they gon’ do
Swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but the truth
Don’t shoot
Hands up, don’t shoot x 2
I’m warning you don’t shoot
Hands up, don’t shoot x 2
Swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but the truth
Don’t shoot
Verse 3:
Did you care? When Eric Garner was gasping for air?
Did you care when Trayvon Martin was caught in the crosshairs
Did you care? Tell the truth, did you even shed a tear?
Do you have kids of your own? Do you problems really compare?
Is it fair? To pass judgement when you weren’t even there?
Are blinded by the glare, or just hearing impaired?
Are you scared? Or too caught up in foreign affairs
To admit that the same thing is happening over here?
I can see it crystal clear, but it isn’t just Black and White
It’s Middle Eastern, Hispanic, anyone who ain’t they’re type
Doesn’t matter if you’re strollin’, roliin’, or on a bike
It could be in broad daylight or the middle of the night
And they can try to claim they don’t know the difference from wrong and right
But you know better, cuz nobody said it better than Spike
And when I’m on the mic I just say whatever I like
So if you don’t agree then feel free to take a hike
Cuz when you’re young and you’re brown and you grow up in the South
You see things that’’ll make you want throw up in your mouth
Sometimes it kinda makes me wanna murder, for reala
But f*ck the police and peace to my man Dilla
Cuz yo, I’m not a terrorist, kill or a thug
Just a person who knows the pain of losing someone you love
These are struggles every black and minority goes through
So when I say throw your hands up, motherf*cker don’t shoot
Hook:
Don’t shoot, for those of you who share my world view
Don’t shoot. just turn on the news if you want proof
Don’t shoot. no limit to what they gon’ do
Swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but the truth
Don’t shoot, unless it’s with your mobile devices
Don’t shoot, unless you witness someone in crisis
Don’t shoot, we got problems that are bigger than Isis
So my message to you and my word of advice is
Don’t shoot
Hands up, don’t shoot x 2
I’m begging you don’t shoot
Don’t shoot, R.I.P. Young Bou
Swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but the truth
Don’t shoot
credits
released February 23, 2017
Written, Performed and Produced by Amerigo Gazaway
Joyner Lucas – I’m Not Racist
Lyrics
With all due respect
I don’t have pity for you black niggas, that’s the way I feel
Screamin’ “Black Lives Matter”
All the black guys rather be deadbeats than pay your bills
Yellin’ “nigga this” and “nigga that”
Call everybody “nigga” and get a nigga mad
As soon as I say “nigga” then everyone react
And wanna swing at me and call me racist ’cause I ain’t black
Well pound that then
Talkin’ about slavery like you was around back then
Like you was pickin’ cotton off the fuckin’ ground back then
Like you was on the plantation gettin’ down back then
Aight, look
I see a black man aimin’ his gun
But I’d rather see a black man claimin’ his son
And I don’t mean just for one day and you done
I mean, you still trapped in a rut
And I work my ass off and I pay my taxes for what?
So you can keep livin’ off free government assistance?
Food stamps for your children, but you’re still tryna sell ’em
For some weed and some liquor or a fuckin’ babysitter
While you party on the road ’cause you ain’t got no fuckin’ goals?
You already late
You motherfuckas needa get your damn priorities straight
Wait, it’s like you’re proud to be fake
But you lazy as fuck and you’d rather sell drugs
Than get a job and be straight, and then you turn around and complain
About the poverty rate? Fuck outta my face!
You can’t escape problems
You can pray for some change but can’t break a dollar
Got nobody else to blame, so you blame Donald
“They fuck the world with a Make America Great condom”
My voice been back
I’m not racist, my sister’s boyfriend’s black
I’m not racist, my sister-in-law’s baby cousin Tracy
Got a brother and his girlfriend’s black
My head’s in the cloud
Heard there’s not enough jobs for all the men in your house
Maybe we should build a wall to keep the Mexicans out
Or maybe we should send ’em all to the ghetto for now
I’m not racist and I never lie
But I think there’s a disconnect between your culture and mine
I worship the Einsteins, study the Steve Jobs
But you ride 2Pac’s dick like he was a fuckin’ god, oh my god
And all you care about is rappin’
And stuntin’ and bein’ ratchet, and that’s the nigga within you
Music rotting your brain and slowly start to convince you
Then you let your kids listen and then the cycle continues
Blame it all on the menu, blame it on those drinks
Blame it on everybody except for your own race
Blame it on white privileges, blame it on white kids
And just blame it on white citizens, same with the vice president
Bunch of class clowns
Niggas kneelin’ on the field, that’s a flag down
How dare you try to make demands for this money?
You gon’ show us some respect, you gon’ stand for this country, nigger!
I’m not racist
I’m just prepared for this type of war
I heard Eminem’s rap at the awards, who’s he fightin’ for?
Y’all can take that motherfucker, too, he ain’t white no more
It’s like you wanna be so famous
You’ll do anything for attention and a little payment
I can’t take you nowhere without people pointin’ fingers
Pants hangin’ off your ass, you ain’t got no home trainin’?
Put your fuckin’ pants up, nigga! Put that suit back on!
Take that du-rag off! Take that gold out your mouth!
Quit the pitiful stuff
And then maybe police would stop killin’ you fucks
Yo, what the fuck? I’m not racist
It’s like we livin’ in the same buildin’ but split into two floors
I’m not racist
But there’s two sides to every story, I wish that I knew yours
I wish that I knew yours
I’m not racist, I swearWith all disrespect
I don’t really like you white motherfuckers, that’s just where I’m at
Screaming “All Lives Matter”
Is a protest to my protest, what kind of shit is that?
And that’s one war you’ll never win
The power in the word “nigga” is a different sin
We shouldn’t say it but we do, and that just what it is
But that don’t mean that you can say it just ’cause you got nigga friends
Nigga, that word was originated for you to keep us under
And when we use it, we know that’s just how we greet each other
And when you use it, we know there’s a double meaning under
And even if I wasn’t picking cotton physically
That don’t mean I’m not affected by the history
My grandmama was a slave, that shit gets to me
And you ain’t got no motherfucking sympathy, you pussy nigga!
I’m sorry you can never feel my life
Tryna have faith, but I never felt alright
It’s hard to elevate when this country’s ran by whites
Judging me by my skin color and my blackness
Tryna find a job but ain’t nobody call me back yet
Now I gotta sell drugs to put food in my cabinet
You crackers ain’t slick, this is all a part of your tactics
Don’t talk about no motherfucking taxes, when I ain’t making no dough
You think you know everything but you don’t
You wanna copy our slang and everything that we know
Try to steal black culture and then make it your own, whoa
Fuck, I’m exhausted
I can’t even drive without the cops tryna start shit
I’m tired of the systematic racism bullshit
All you do is false shit, this the shit that I’m force fed
And you don’t know shit about my people, that’s what bothers you
You don’t know about no fried chicken and no barbeque
You don’t know about the two-step or no loose change
You don’t know about no 2 Chainz or no Kool-Aid, you don’t know!
And even though Barack was half as black
You hated president Obama, I know that’s a fact
You couldn’t wait to get him out and put a cracker back
And then you gave us Donald Trump and now it’s payback for that
I’m not racist, I never lied
But I know there’s a disconnect between your culture and mine
Yeah, I praise 2Pac like he was a fuckin’ god
He was fighting for his life way before he fuckin’ died, nigga, die nigga!
And all you care about is money and power
And being ugly and that’s the cracker within you
Hatred all in your brain, it slowly start to convince you
And then you teach it to your children until the cycle continue
Blame it on Puerto Rico, blame it on OJ
Blame it on everybody, except for your own race
Blame it on black niggas and blame it on black citizens
Aim at the black businesses, I ain’t saying I’m innocent
But, I might be any day now
Treatin’ everybody how you want and any way how
I swear North Korea ’bout to bomb us any day now
And now I’m duckin’ everytime I hear a fuckin’ plane now, shit
You know I make a lot of sense but you just can’t admit it
When Eminem went against Trump, that was the illest
‘Cause even though he’s white, he let us know he standin’ with us
I’m not racist, but I cry a lot
You don’t know what it’s like to be in a frying pot
You don’t know what it’s like to mind your business
And get stopped by the cops and not know if you ’bout to die or not
You worry ’bout your life, so you take mine
I love you but I fuckin’ hate you at the same time
I wish we could trade shoes or we could change lives
So we could understand each other more but that’d take time
I’m not racist
It’s like we livin’ in the same buildin’ but splittin’ the both sides
I’m not racist
But there’s two sides to every story and now you know mine
Can’t erase the scars with a bandage
I’m hopin’ maybe we can come to an understandin’
Agree to disagree, we could have an understandin’
I’m not racist
Odetta “Freedom Trilogy”
Odetta – December 31, 1930 – December 2, 2008
The Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole Talks To Us About Creating 50 Years of Revolutionary Culture and Art
On this episode of Renegade Culture the Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole discusses the upcoming 50th anniversary of their groundbreaking album and creating revolutionary art; the rise of Black Power and the politics of the word Nigga; celebrating and suing Hip-Hop artist who sampled their work.
Follow us on Soundcloud, Apple and social media.
Hosted by Kalonji Changa and Kamau Franklin
Produced by Naka “The Ear Dr”
Recorded at Playback Studios in the Historic West End of Atlanta, Ga
Mosi-Blog 