But he's tired of being fetishized as "one of the good ones," and he's tired of bohemian critics with denigrative attitudes about hip-hop. He calls out the white establishment for its persnickety elitism and credential humping: "They want to hear good freestyling with the sarcasm of Woody Allen," BUSDRIVER raps on "Cool Buzz Band." BUSDRIVER is many critics' Platonic ideal of a rapper: smart, adenoidal, free-associative, self-lampooning. Despite his fortuitous background, BUSDRIVER has always felt most at home in the wacky world of mass transit.įear Of A Black Tangent's production is slightly gauzy, but it doesn't matter because BUSDRIVER's protestations are so spot-on. But no: He's the son of a screenwriter, showrunner, and all-around straight arrow (Ralph Farquhar, whose credits include "Moesha"). Given his penchant for undecodable jabberwocky, you might assume that BUSDRIVER was raised by wolves. Related: From Aretha Franklin To Public Enemy, Here's How Artists Have Amplified Social Justice Movements Through Music Jungle Brothers, Straight Out The Jungle (1988) But they all exude Black solidarity and revolutionary fervor. Some are faith-based others advance a Black nationalist or Marxist perspective.
So do Jay Electronica (a GRAMMY nominee), Isaiah Rashad, Noname, and others.īelow are nine hip-hop albums of "revolutionary" character. Thirteen-time GRAMMY winner Kendrick Lamar-a familiar face at police reform rallies-shares his forebears' penchant for protest. There were hand-washing PSAs aplenty, but very few howls of indignation.ĭoes this mean the flames of revolt have been extinguished? Absolutely not. How could it with so many rappers' livelihoods hanging perniciously in the balance? But many would argue the hip-hop community didn't push back all that forcefully on the bunglers of our national COVID-19 response. In fact, X Clan were among the demonstrators who in 1989 descended on hostile territory for a Day of Outrage.īut hip-hop responded differently to COVID-19, even when the pandemic snarled Black and brown people like nobody else.
And when subsequent presidents beefed up their strategies of surveillance and entrapment, hip-hop spoke up again sometimes in song-who could forget Ice-T's disavowal of the security state on "Drama"?)-and sometimes in person. When Ronald Reagan's austerity government caused deep harm to Black communities, hip-hop spoke up, asserting its humanity with albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy and Pure Righteousness by Lakim Shabazz. Studied observers know that hip-hop rarely goes along to get along, or consents to being made a cat's paw of.
0 kommentar(er)
