![]() Over two consecutive weekends, April 14-16 and 21-23, the Empire Polo Club in Indio will welcome hundreds of thousands of attendees (not to mention all the people watching the live streams) for the 22nd edition of the festival. It’s April and for the Southern California music scene that means one thing: It’s time for Coachella. Read: Black Sounds Beautiful: How Kendrick Lamar Became A Rap Icon Smino, blkswn (2017) But even when he's singing-in a coiled, stricken, serpentine falsetto-Lamar has plenty to say about obstacles one faces when seeking self-love and self-cultivation in the Black underclass. Loving TPAB, by far the most inward-looking and "experimental" of Lamar's four studio albums, is, to quote "U," complicated, at least for those who prefer K.Dot as the rough-and-ready, battle-rapping prole from times past. Typical of To Pimp A Butterfly is "Institutionalized," where Lamar's grandmother is quoted as telling her grandbabies, "Don't s* change until you get up and wash your ass." The record mosies along at an unbothered pace, lapping up the borrowed wisdom of Lamar's elders. city, was like a Victorian novel, densely plotted and stuffed to the brim with interweaving characters. Imagine if Adrian Nicole LeBlanc had followed up her groundbreaking book "Random Family" with a scrapbook of fortune-cookie-like benedictions, incantations and truisms. "I'm a post-rap wizkid," he says on the mocking "Sphinx's Coonery." "My speech is littered with double entendres and sharp sarcasm." Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp A Butterfly (2015) But he's tired of being fetishized as "one of the good ones," and he's tired of bohemian critics with denigrative attitudes about hip-hop. He calls out the white establishment for its persnickety elitism and credential humping: "They want to hear good freestyling with the sarcasm of Woody Allen," BUSDRIVER raps on "Cool Buzz Band." BUSDRIVER is many critics' Platonic ideal of a rapper: smart, adenoidal, free-associative, self-lampooning. ![]() Despite his fortuitous background, BUSDRIVER has always felt most at home in the wacky world of mass transit.įear Of A Black Tangent's production is slightly gauzy, but it doesn't matter because BUSDRIVER's protestations are so spot-on. But no: He's the son of a screenwriter, showrunner, and all-around straight arrow (Ralph Farquhar, whose credits include "Moesha"). Given his penchant for undecodable jabberwocky, you might assume that BUSDRIVER was raised by wolves. Related: From Aretha Franklin To Public Enemy, Here's How Artists Have Amplified Social Justice Movements Through Music Jungle Brothers, Straight Out The Jungle (1988) But they all exude Black solidarity and revolutionary fervor. Some are faith-based others advance a Black nationalist or Marxist perspective. ![]() So do Jay Electronica (a GRAMMY nominee), Isaiah Rashad, Noname, and others.īelow are nine hip-hop albums of "revolutionary" character. Thirteen-time GRAMMY winner Kendrick Lamar-a familiar face at police reform rallies-shares his forebears' penchant for protest. There were hand-washing PSAs aplenty, but very few howls of indignation.ĭoes this mean the flames of revolt have been extinguished? Absolutely not. ![]() How could it with so many rappers' livelihoods hanging perniciously in the balance? But many would argue the hip-hop community didn't push back all that forcefully on the bunglers of our national COVID-19 response. In fact, X Clan were among the demonstrators who in 1989 descended on hostile territory for a Day of Outrage.īut hip-hop responded differently to COVID-19, even when the pandemic snarled Black and brown people like nobody else. And when subsequent presidents beefed up their strategies of surveillance and entrapment, hip-hop spoke up again sometimes in song-who could forget Ice-T's disavowal of the security state on "Drama"?)-and sometimes in person. When Ronald Reagan's austerity government caused deep harm to Black communities, hip-hop spoke up, asserting its humanity with albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy and Pure Righteousness by Lakim Shabazz. Studied observers know that hip-hop rarely goes along to get along, or consents to being made a cat's paw of.
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