It is interesting how hip hop/rap music in the beginning, or a song like Grand Master Flash's The Message - Where basically they were saying 'its like a jungle sometimes, i wonder how I keep from going under'. The whole root of what that song was was basically these are the problems here.
Here we are 10+ years later, these problems are still there, and the intensity of the music has built, to the 'no hope, I don't give a F' attitude.
How did we get from Grand Master Flash - The Message to where we are now, in Hip Hop?
[Tupac]
Again, you have to be logical.
If I know, that in this hotel room, they have food everyday.
And I knock on the door, everyday, to eat, and they open the door, let me see the party, let me see them throwing salami all over, just throwing food around, but they are telling me that there is no food in there.
Everyday, I'm standing outside trying to sing my way in - 'we are hungry, please let us in'
After about a week, that song is going to change to, 'we hungry, we need some food'.
After 2, 3 weeks, its like 'gimme all the food or I'm breakin down the door!'
After a year, its just like, 'I'm pickin the lock, comin through blastin!'Its like you're hungry, you've reached your level, you don't want anymore.
We asked 10 years ago, we was asking with The Panthers, we was asking with them.
The Civil Rights movement, we was asking.
Now those people that were asking, they are dead or in jail.
So now what do you think we're going to do?
And we shouldn't be angry?
That is an excerpt from the full interview, which is available below.
I felt his description to be powerful, though at the same time the intensity of music through-out America has increased.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, it seems that much of the Civil Rights movement is over, with the diffused arguments of controlled Negros on TV arguing for integration and equal rights, while overlooking the sheer White Supremacist architecture of the nation we all reside in.
The complete absence of any meaningful political awareness in popular black media, speaking on colonialism as the root of all problems in segregated ghettos, makes me feel the war has long been lost. With the propaganda model of government fully injected into the minds of the majority, will they ever question their identities and memories to a degree that would allow them to free themselves?