Outside of music, KRS-ONE, leader of the “Stop the Violence” campaign in the 1980s, waded into hot water at the New Yorker Festival when he said that “we laughed” on 9/11. Eminem briefly states “in remembrance of September 11th” on a track. Andre 3000 expressed solidarity with the workers hurt by the immediate airline industry contraction. Immediately after 9/11, Petey Pablo transformed his hard-edged party anthem “North Carolina,” which had been a hit that summer, into the patriotic, other 49-state celebrating “U.S.A.” (and sort of ended up two syllables short on the chorus). Bush, sit down, I’m in charge of the war.” The scant general response (when measured against the vast output of rap lyrics over the past ten years) may reflect anything from personal reluctance to confront the topic, or perhaps even the reluctance of record labels, management teams, or marketing people to go there. There was the casually cynical (50 Cent: “If any planes hit the projects nobody would care, look around, ain’t nothing but black folks around here”) and the cryptically mysterious (Nas: “I’m the shaky hand that touched George Foreman in Zaire, the same hand that punched down devils that brought down the towers.”) Ghostface Killah, of the Wu Tang Clan, in a song released in early December 2001, came closest to expressing the anger that most people-especially New Yorkers-felt, furiously calling on Bin Laden to reveal himself, advocating American unity, and stating “Mr. Rap’s reactions ranged from conspiracy theory-lite (Jadakiss, in a song composed entirely of rhetorical questions, asks “Why did Bush knock down the towers?”) to conspiracy theory-heavy (Immortal Technique’s “Bin Laden” (with Mos Def on a chorus that makes no sense to me. Some rappers burst into surprisingly patriotic rhapsodies, while others emphasized the continued plight of black Americans. What response there was, was somewhat scatter-shot. It’s somewhat surprising that since 9/11 was an attack on New York-the birthplace of hip-hop and its epicenter-and an event of a magnitude that had not been seen by anyone in the hip-hop generation, that there was not more of a response. Just because a rapper didn’t mention it on the mic does not mean he or she didn’t or doesn’t have deep feelings about it, it just seems like those mentions were few and far between. When it came to 9/11, almost everyone experienced it through television. When Chuck D referred to rap as black America’s CNN, he did not mean that rappers are a general-interest news source but rather that rap is how black communities report on themselves to one another. to South Africa, became more routine topics. By the late ‘80s, as rap became more politically engaged, current events involving race relations, from the U.S. Rappers in the early ‘80s mentioned the perilous crime, drugs, inflation and unemployment that plagued their neighborhoods, but largely ignored specific occurrences. “Smiling Faces”, “What’s Going On”) but in the early days of rap, there was little direct reference to specific current events. The ‘60s and ‘70s saw many songs about current events by black artists (e.g.
The two basic responses to credit crunches are advocated and reflected in the African American musical archive. The bad macro-economic advice to “save up yo money” in the above folk ditty was countered by Billy Paul’s 1970s Keynesian anthem “Let The Dollar Circulate,” which was sampled by rapper Young Jeezy for his song “Circulate” in early 2009 in response to the 2008 liquidity crisis. I wear clothes made for all kinds of weather I wear shoes made of all kinds of leather, A nickel worth of meal and a dime of lard The prolific body of song describing natural and man-made calamities was one of the few types of Afro-American song that came close to being a historical record.įor years following the Panic of 1907, according to Levine, the folk memory of the hard times that liquidity crisis induced reverberated in song. He surmises about the proliferation: The fact that song could be utilized to expunge difficulties may well help to account for the strong tradition of disaster songs in black music.
Levine surveys the many songs made about events current at the turn of the 20th century. In the landmark study Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), the late Lawrence W. Making songs, rhymes, or ditties about national tragedies has a long history in African American folk expression. More so than the work of his fellow rappers, Juelz Santana’s raps fit into an old tradition, peppering sincere musical memorials of tragedy with humor.
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