TURMOIL OF THE TIMES
Black musicians’ works reflect social unrest
When he entered the recording studio this spring, Grammy and Oscar-winning rapper Common had plenty to vent about — and it all came out.
Police shootings. Institutionalized racism. Mass incarceration. Fouled water supplies. White privilege. Wage gaps. Black Lives Matter. Inner-city violence.
“Things just felt more urgent for me,” Common said of Black America Again, his 11th studio CD and easily his angriest.
His album dropped, not coincidentally, on Election Day. It became just the latest politically charged record by black artists this year — others include Alicia Keys’s Here, Solange’s A Seat at the Table and, of course, Lemonade by Solange’s sister Beyoncé, who made headlines with the black-empowerment themes in her video for Formation and during her Super Bowl halftime show — reflecting through music the power, and sometimes disillusionment, that black people are feeling.
“I definitely believe that artists are just becoming more aware,” said Common, who is not new to socially conscious rap. “It feels like it’s a critical time where you have to be aware even if you’re not necessarily so into politics.”
Artists “are dealing with a lot of things that they see in their lives and in the world around them,” said University of Arizona religious studies professor Alex Nava, who explores spirituality in hip hop. “Maybe it will galvanize and revitalize the more radical spirit of music.”
Tip (T.I.) Harris has always had songs with a political edge, but this year took it further. Motivated by the police shootings of two young black men over the summer in Minnesota and Louisiana, in September he released the six-song EP Us or Else, which focuses on social justice and police brutality. The video for one song, Warzone, re-enacts the way several black men died at the hands of police, but uses white actors as victims to question the role race played. He expanded his EP into a full, 15-song CD this month, Us or Else: Letter to the System.
“I didn’t plan on making it a project. I just started recording records based on how I felt. I just felt I should be doing something,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t feel like anyone was speaking to it and I felt compelled to do something.”
The social activism has spread beyond music. Chance the Rapper backed anti-violence measures in Chicago, used his concerts to register fans to vote and joined Solange and Keys in celebrating the victory for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose protests helped halt the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
Hip-hop elders A Tribe Called Quest re-emerged at the end of 2016 with a decidedly political edge after more than a decade away, attacking gentrification in We the People ... and drawing a dystopian future in which the rich flee Earth in The Space Program.
Even artists like John Legend, whose lyrics are more defined by love and relationships, pushed past his comfort zone on his new CD Darkness and Light.
“We are on Twitter, we are going to the cities and we’re seeing what’s happening out there in the streets, on the news and however we are seeing it. And I think artists are reacting to that,” he said. “I think we feel that sense of urgency because the community feels that sense of urgency.”
Nava, who has been teaching his course Rap, Culture and God for 10 years, said artists take cues from their community and he’s noticed a shift in his students’ tastes over the years. “I find more and more young people that are disenchanted with kind of played-out themes of girls and cars and jewelry and tired refrains of making money and boasting about guns,” he said. “My students are really craving a more thoughtful content, more poetic content, a stronger social vision.”
Activism and music were firmly linked at the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March last year when marchers sang the chorus of Alright from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, an album many say helped reconnect hip hop to its political roots.
Questlove of The Roots in late 2014 challenged musicians to step up and be “a voice of the times that we live in.” He asked for real stories and real narratives. “Protest songs don’t have to be boring,” he said. “They just have to speak truth.”