Category: Music Videos

Chuck D and Flav had already told us all that women were “blind to the facts” of who they were because they watched the wrong television shows. Slick Rick warned us to pre-emptively treat women like prostitutes since all they did was “hurt and trample.” Too Short painted the freakiest of tales and constantly reminded us that the correct pronunciation of the words “woman” and/or “girl” was “bitch.”

Big Daddy Kane and Nice and Smooth let us know that no matter what we heard from Too Short, pimping was never easy. The Geto Boys showed us howto kick a woman in the ass if she claimed to be pregnant with our baby. Before we elected a modern Falstaff with hoish tendencies to the White House, MC Ren evocatively taught us how to gang rape a fourteen year old preacher’s daughter and sodomize any woman “saying that they never would suck a dick.”

This was 1993.

Back in my dorm room, I rewind-pause-played my way through the shifting points of view of “Not Yet Free.” I memorized all three verses the same night I saw it and told my boy, Eric Caples — a formidable MC himself — that I’d just heard the perfect rap song. The next day, in Eric’s room, I watched his face as he watched the video.

The first image beneath the boom of the 808 was a black woman standing upright in matching white necklace, bracelet and earrings. The woman had a sawed off shotgun on her back and a child in her arms. She looked directly into the face of the she child was nursing. As engrossing as the image was, Eric was mesmerized by what he heard.

The Coup’s DJ, a woman named “Pam, the Funkstress,” scratched — teased — variations of Ice Cube’s “Blacks are … Blacks … Blacks … Blacks are too f—-ing broke …” for 40 seconds before finally arriving at “Blacks are too f—-ing broke to be Republican.”

Eric bobbed his head to the beat and furrowed his brow when Boots rhymed, “Everyday I pulls a front so nobody pulls my card / I got a mirror in my pocket and I practice looking hard.” Neither of us had ever heard that kind of hyper-awareness of our hyper-awareness, not even from Ice Cube.

We both covered our mouths when the organ dropped and Boots explored his role in capitalism: “This web is made of money, made of greed, made of me. Oh, what I have become in a parasite economy.”

Eric closed his eyes and smiled at the precision, sensory details and familiarity of E-Roc’s verse and voice as he picked up where Boots left off.

“In the winter there’s a splinter with the smell of the rain
And the scent of the street, but all I smell is the pain
Of a brotha who’s a hustler and he’s stuck to the grind
Of a sista who’s a hooker gotta sell her behind.”

Later in the verse, E-Roc ruptured the individual desperation narrative, placing himself as an actor, agent and witness on the streets he previously described: “Now my dreams and aspiration go from single to whole / As I realize there’s a million motherf—-ers in the cold.”

Boots came back in at the end of the song, with a new point of view. The shift was marked by a minimal bass guitar and deepening of his voice. In the video, Boots’ words come out of the mouth of a pawn shop owner whose store is filled with guns we presume he’ll sell to brothers killing other brothers.

“N—-az, thugs, dope dealers and pimps
Basketball players, rap stars and simps
That’s what little black boys… are made of …
Sluts, hoes and press the naps around your neck
Broads, pop that coochie, b——es stay in check
That’s what little black girls… are made of …”

The point of view changed hands one more time, as Boots reoccupied his subject position and asked, “But if we’re made of that, who made us? / And what can we do to change us?” He delivered his last lines of the verse to pawn shop owner, the surveillance camera and, ultimately, to us.

I stopped the VCR before the end of the song to see what Eric Caples had to say. I told him that I was going to use my work-study check to buy some gas for Mama’s car, then drive the mall to buy the whole album tomorrow. I remember literally telling him that Boots was my new favorite MC and that I believed “Not Yet Free” could change hip-hop forever.

“It’s dope,” Eric eventually said about the song and video. “They can rap and that DJ can scratch. Boots ain’t no Snoop, though. And I can tell you right now that that tape won’t be noChronic either.”

I sucked my teeth, and rewound the VHS to the beginning of the video again.

Sitting on the floor of that dorm room, I would have sworn on everything I loved that hip-hop would never be the same after “Not Yet Free” and Kill My Landlord — even though I hadn’t heard it yet. I really knew that everything involving hip-hop, black boys, black girls, freedom, capitalism, raced oppression, truth, rape music, violence, white supremacy, honesty and me was about to change forever.

The next morning, with a pocket full of work-study money, I headed to Super D to buy some new clippers to cut my hair. The clippers were more expensive than I thought they’d be so I bought a du-rag instead. I put the du-rag on in Mama’s hooptie and headed to Camelot.

The manager told me that they didn’t carry Kill My Landlord and that he hadn’t even heard of The Coup. He claimed he could get one copy of the album in stock in 7-10 business days if I wanted him to. I thought hard about whether I’d have money for the album in 7-10 business days.

A half hour later, I purchased Above the Law’s Black Mafia Life and a three-piece from Popeyes.

Back in my dorm room, I blasted a song called, “Pimpology 101” and set my roommate’s VCR to record another episode of Rap City.

This was 1993.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/04/17/177326079/this-was-1993-20-years-ago-i-heard-the-perfect-rap-song?sc=tw&cc=twmp