I decided my put my thoughts about the George Zimmerman not guilty verdict into a 16 bar verse. The lyrics are below
Do you wanna know how messed up the system is?
Imagine if Trayvon killed George Zimmerman
You think Trayvon would have been found innocent?
He would have faced a lifetime of imprisonment
See Stand Your Ground only works if you’re a citizen
So that right isn’t his only whites benefit
We are not legitimate that fact is definitive
Don’t believe ask Marissa Alexander if it is
To protect herself in her own home with her kids
Fired a warning shot she got a 20 year sentencing
Now that’s ridicules but all Black are witnesses
Of the hatred in this nation that’s run by hypocrites
Would the NRA have backed Trayvon?
Would Fox news tell white folks if he gets off stay calm?
We know the truth so I won’t go no further
Cause Trayvon was found guilty of his own murder
Today, Pharoahe Monch releases a rough version of “Stand Your Ground” in light of the George Zimmerman verdict. Originally intended for his upcoming PTSD LP, Pharoahe chose instead to release the track today and encourage people to “get involved”.
I decided to put my thoughts about the Zimmerman Trial, the Voting Rights Act, and Race in America in a 16 bar verse:
Oh you was born black welcome to the curse race
Oh you was born brown you sure this is your birthplace
This is America the home of the white man
Where every other American gets a hyphen
People of color police shoot us on site man
And then be like damn I was just frightened
See just the color of my skin is intimidating
Here I’m a criminal just based on my pigmentation
We need God our only mass is incarceration
We need Jesus cause these preachers got the heart of Satan
They toast to our death celebrating with ice cream
Vanilla with the cake cone must be a white thing
They wanna stop us from voting well what do rights mean?
If the end result of our struggle can just be wiped clean
And Zimmerman is a creepy ass cracker
A racist child murdering liar and bad actor
This to me; is very Important because as a latino in the United States.
I’ve seen and I’ve heard stories about how cops judge people on race; however
I would hate to see another Color, Person, Ect mistreated wrongly by basically discriminating against are appearance.
It isn’t alright in my opinion – LG
Don’t Tread on Me: Yasiin Bey (Aka Mos Def) public service announcement on the harmful impact of stop and frisk on communities and how New Yorkers are taking the fight for their rights to the courts.
Lyrics
#10FriskCommandments Remix LYRICS
Hands up if you ever seen a handcuff…
Hands up if you ever seen a handcuff…
My little man touched me in the heart, we was at the park
Watch him run the rock, time to go cause its getting dark
Last play of the game, hard foul fight starts,
i’m peeling out because i don’t want my son to see the night sparks
before i get the 5 feet, the blue lights behind me.
Pulling over, cool as ice til something reminds me
My little man is in the car, that something was him
asking me if i was gonna get taken away by them
I laughed like i wasn’t concerned
But in the back of mind i remember the time when i made a U TURN
And got pulled over for suspicious action
My white friend got pulled out so they could ask him
what he was doing with me, that incident was one among many
I wanna tell my son that that’s silly
He’s only 3, and im not even sure its wise
or fair to have to teach him to survive before he’s five
That night I read him 10 commandments and I nearly cried
cause it wasn’t the bible it was from Jasiri’s rhymes
Its the 10 frisk commandments…
I’ve never known a time when I wasn’t really warned
about how blackness is perceived with some malice and some scorn.
But Mama I’m sure I didn’t do nothing wrong
And then she said that’s not the point I just don’t want to see you gone.
Growing up it was me who was questioning the fact that being black
That I was somehow always under some sort of attack
It was the bad kids, the thuggish ones, I will be okay
and that’s the same bullshit they used on Kimani Grey
Its 2013 how is not being white still a crime
and the innocent still get stopped and frisked all the time
I’m American, I thought that came with some sort of rights
That was undeniable whether my skin was dark or light
Such a fright, abuse of authoritative might,
Such a sight, to see young folks scared to even fight
For their rights, guess what, we need more voices who are white
lets unite, and put this shit to bed and say good night…
It’s the 10 Frisk Commandments
Driving through New York I see’em inside my rear view
Lights on, sirens sound, pull over, yeah I hear you
I guess you see four black men in an SUV so you expect we sling
I felt like Ice T, it was six in the morning
He asked where we going, we rolling to a performance
He asked if was I drinkin’, I told him I don’t indulge in the spirits
but he wasn’t trying to hear it
He pulled out the breathalyzer, like i was the best of liars
but my man Radee, had the Canon 5D
Commandment number 9 yeah we film the police
And because were were recording, we got off with the warning
I asked why he pulled us over, What a surprise
He said my lights were off but it was passed sunrise
And I was thankful that none of us died
Stopped and frisked in N-Y but at least we survived
By the 10 frisk commandments.
After inciting public outrage from Emmett Till’s family for controversial lyric, Lil Wayne has issued an official statement to apologize for his actions.
Wayne offended the Till family on his unauthorized remix of Future’s “Karate Chop,” in which he rapped, “beat the pu**y up like Emmett Till.” Epic Records would eventually pull the song from the Internet and re-release it with censored lyrics. However, Wayne remained unapologetic throughout the whole ordeal.
Recently, the family has also tried to halt Lil Wayne’s endorsement deal with Mountain Dew. Much like when Reebook pulled their campaign from Rick Ross, the family hoped it would force an apology.
In Wayne’s apology, he acknowledges the pain he might have caused on the Till family. Then, he promises to never perform the song live or reference Emmett Till in future songs again. Read the full letter below.
Dear Till Family:
As a recording artist, I have always been interested in word play. My lyrics often reference people, places and events in my music, as well as the music that I create for or alongside other artists.
It has come to my attention that lyrics from my contribution to a fellow artist’s song has deeply offended your family. As a father myself, I cannot imagine the pain that your family has had to endure. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge your hurt, as well as the letter you sent to me via your attorneys.
Moving forward, I will not use or reference Emmett Till or the Till family in my music, especially in an inappropriate manner. I fully support Epic Record’s decision to take down the unauthorized version of the song and to not include the reference in the version that went to retail. I will not be performing the lyrics that contain that reference live and have removed them from my catalogue.
I have tremendous respect for those who paved the way for the liberty and opportunities that African-Americans currently enjoy. As a business owner who employs several African-American employees and gives philanthropically to organizations that help youth to pursue their dreams my ultimate intention is to uplift rather than degrade our community.
Kill My Landlord is the debut album by political hip hop group the Coup,
Released May 4, 1993
Throwback Music video for the day
The Coup – Not Yet Free
On May 4th, decades before James Todd Smith accidentally bartered the bloody residue of transatlantic slavery for some gold chains, I wore a $4.33 burnt orange du-rag and Cross Colours T-shirt to a record store called Camelot Music in Jackson, Miss. A few days earlier, before purchasing the du-rag or making the twenty-minute trek to Camelot in Mama’s hooptie, I popped a VHS with old episodes of Martin in my roommate’s VCR and I recorded a video onRap City by a new group from Oakland called The Coup. The song was called “Not Yet Free” and the unreleased album was entitled Kill My Landlord.
This was 1993.
I was six years removed from 2 Live Crew’s Move Somethin’album cover ushering me into puberty; five years from BDP and Public Enemy revising revisionist American histories; five from NWA showing us all how and why we should f—- the police; three years from LL’s attempt at a “conscious” racial profiling song; two years from Ice Cube making the most provocative albumof the late 20th Century; one year from a predictable bloody rebellion in LA; and five months from Dr. Dre forcing us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about cinematic weed music, while birthing a puppy dog named Snoop. rolex watches
In Jackson, and other parts of the black belt, we were no longer the dutiful disciples of Holy Trinity of MCs — KRS,Kane and Rakim. We respected the gods, but we were done exclusively eavesdropping on the rhymes coming out of New York City. West coast music, as varied as it was, met us where we were and, truth be told, it was music we could see and hear. We also accepted that the west coast and the black belt were family, and had been since the second great migration of the 1940’s ushered thousands of southern black families to Los Angeles for jobs in the automotive and defense industries.
It’s true that the south, dismissed as culturally slow, meaningless and less hip (hop) than New York, had yet to, as Albert Murray wrote, lyrically stylize our southern worlds into significance. But if outsiders really listened to the musty movement behind the Geto Boys, UGK and 8 Ball and MJG, they would have heard the din of deeply southern black boys and girls eager to keep it reallocal. We wanted to use hip-hop’s brash boast, confessional and critique to unapologetically order the chaos of our country lives through country lenses with little regard to whether it sounded like real hip-hop. Fashion watches
We were real blues people, familiar in some way or another with dirt. There were no skyscrapers and orange-brown projects stopping us from looking up and out. We didn’t know what it was like to move with enclosed subway trains slithering beneath our feet. And we liked it that way.
En route to lyrical acceptance of our dirty, we met Scarface, Ice Cube, Pimp C, Bun B, MC Renand D.O.C. And after a while, we realized that they were our cousins, our uncles, our best friends, us. We lyrically rode through Compton, Oakland, Port Arthur and Houston the same way we rode through Jackson, Meridian, Little Rock, New Orleans and Birmingham. We rode in long cars with windows down, bass quaking and air fresheners sparkling like Christmas tree ornaments.
We felt pride in knowing that the greatest producer alive was an uncle from Compton, and the most anticipated MC in the history of hip-hop was a lanky brother from Long Beach. We knew, no matter what anyone in New York said, the baddest MC on earth, song for song, album for album, was an aging cousin from South Central Los Angeles whose government name was O’Shea.
As inspirational as we found Dre’s music, Snoop’s flow and Cube’s criticism, an articulated fear and hatred of black women was part of what made them so nationally attractive. Like nearly all of our lyrical pedagogues, these MCs practiced a form of spectacular psychological and/or emotional dismantling of black women passed down by the practices, policies and patriarchy of America.
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.
GoldenUndergroundTV recently released an interview I did with them late last year. I got a bit animated at the end. Only so many interviews in a row I could handle being asked about Chief Keef.
My tirade wasn’t really about Chief Keef. It wasn’t about Gucci Mane or Wocka Flocka or any of the acts spontaneously catapulted into stardom by synchronized mass media coverage despite seemingly universal indifference (at the very best) regarding their talent. Whose arrests, involvement in underaged pregnancies, concert shootouts, and facial tattoos, dominate conversation for weeks at a time, with their actual music a mere afterthought, if thought of at all. My tirade was about marketing. It was about media powers seeking out the biggest pretend criminal kingpins they can find, (many of whom who shamelessly adopt the names of actual real life criminal kingpins like 50 Cent and Rick Ross), and exalting them as the poster children for a culture. It was about an art form reduced to product placement, the selling of a lifestyle, and ultimately, a huge ad for imprisonment.
This is not my opinion.
Last year Corrections Corporation of America (CCA),
the biggest name in the private prison industry,
contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons.
What kind of legitimate and ethical measures could possibly be taken to ensure the maintenance of a 90% prison occupancy rate?
Two months later an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries giving an account of a meeting where it was determined that hip-hop music would be manipulated to drive up privatized prison profits. Its author, despite claiming to be a former industry insider, did not provide the names of anyone involved in the plot, nor did he specify by which company he himself was employed. As such, the letter was largely regarded as a fraud for lack of facts.
Last year a mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans, controlling all the avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity and incite any trend. Time Warner, as owner of Warner Bros Records (among many other record labels), can not only sign an artist to a recording contract but, as the owner of Entertainment Weekly, can see to it that they get next week’s cover. Also the owner of New Line Cinemas, HBO and TNT, they can have their artist cast in a leading role in a film that, when pulled from theaters, will be put into rotation first on premium, then on basic, cable. Without any consideration to the music whatsoever, the artist will already be a star, though such monopolies also extend into radio stations and networks that air music videos. For consumers, choice is often illusory. Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. While Hot 97, NYC’s top hip hop station, is owned by Emmis Communications, online streaming is controlled by Clear Channel, who also owns rival station Power 105.
None of this is exactly breaking news, but when ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.
According to public analysis from Bloomberg, the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Interestingly enough, Vanguard also holds considerable stake in the media giants determining this country’s culture. In fact, Vanguard is the third largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner. Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group, whose correctional, detention and community reentry services boast 101 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds and 18,000 employees. Second nationally only to Corrections Corporation of America, GEO’s facilities are located not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.
You may be thinking, “Well, Vanguard is only the third largest holder in those media conglomerates, which is no guarantee that they’re calling any shots.” Well, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America, second only to Vanguard, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group.
There are many other startling overlaps in private-prison/mass-media ownership, but two underlying facts become clear very quickly: The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.
There are facts to back that up, too.
Prison industry lobbyists developing and encouraging criminal justice policies to advance financial interests has been well-documented. The most notorious example is the Washington-based American Legislative Council, a policy organization funded by CCA and GEO, which successfully championed the incarceration promoting “truth in sentencing” and “three-strikes” sentencing laws. If the motive of the private prison industry were the goodhearted desire to get hold of inmates as quickly as possible for the purpose of sooner successfully rehabilitating them, maintenance of a 90% occupancy rate would be considered a huge failure, not a functioning prerequisite.
Likewise, the largest rise in incarceration that this country has ever seen correlates precisely with early-80′s prison privatization. This despite the fact that crime rates actually declined since this time. This decreasing crime rate was pointed out enthusiastically by skeptics eager to debunk last year’s anonymous industry insider, who painted a picture of popularized hip-hop as a tool for imprisoning masses. What wasn’t pointed out was that despite crime rates going down, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. While the size of the prison population changed dramatically, so did its complexion. In “‘All Eyez on Me’: America’s War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that “the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests.”
Add to this well-documented statistics proving that the so-called “war on drugs” has been waged almost entirely on low-income communities of color, where up until just two years ago, cocaine sold in crack form fetched sentences 100 times as lengthy as the exact same amount of cocaine sold in powdered form, which is much more common in cocaine arrests in affluent communities. (In July 2010 the oddly named Fair Sentencing Act was adopted, which, rather than reducing the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 1-to-1, reduced it to 18-to-1, which is still grossly unfair.) This is not to suggest that the crack/powder disparity represents the extent of the racism rampant within the incarceration industry. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal prison system, even where convicted for the exact same crimes, people of color received prison sentences 10% longer . Where convictions are identical, mandatory minimum sentences are also 21% more likely for people of color.
Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) put it best; “‘hip-hop” is just shorthand for ‘black people.’” Before our eyes and ears, a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture” has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal. Both business are owned by the same people. Mainstream media continue to endorse hip-hop that glorifies criminality (most notably drug trafficking and violence), and private prison interests, long since proven to value profits over human rights, usher in inmates of color to meet capacity quotas. The same people disproportionately incarcerated when exposed to the criminal justice system are at every turn inundated with media normalizing incarceration to the point that wherever there is mainstream hip-hop music, reference to imprisonment as an ordinary, even expected, component of life is sure to follow.
Conspiracy theorists get a lot of flak for daring entertain the notion that people will do evil things for money. Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust are universally acknowledged, yet simultaneously adopted is the contradictory position that there can’t possibly be any human beings around intelligent enough and immoral enough to perpetrate such things. Even in the midst of the Europe-wide beef that was actually horse-meat fiasco, and the release of real-life nightmare documenting films like “Sunshine and Oranges,” there is an abundance of people content to believe that the only conspiracies that ever exist are those that have successfully been exposed.
The link between mass media and the prison industrial complex, however, is part of a very different type of conversation.
The information in this article was not difficult to find; it is all public.
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