I Believe in the People
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ShareMaybe then we shouldn’t be surprised that even the most embedded, mainstream music figures are visiting the Occupy protests. Cynics might sneer at the notion of Russell Simmons, Kanye West or Katy Perry show up to rub elbows with the tent-dwellers in Zuccotti Park, or turn their nose up to how “cool” it’s become to protest.
But that, actually, is the point. These are arguably the artists and personalities most beholden to the powers that be of the music industry (an industry that, once again, is controlled by the one percent). Perry and Simmons may have nothing to lose by strolling for a few photo ops among the masses, but there’s an air of it that also smacks of biting the hand that feeds you. If these artists are gaining the confidence to be out there in the first place, it means that the tectonic plates of our cultural are opening wide enough for real musical rebels to show their true colors.
It’s times like these where the ever-shifting lines between “mainstream” and “underground” become even more blurred. For the past several years that line has probably been the boldest in the world of hip-hop, where enough new labels are spun off every few years to give the true head an ulcer. The division between “conscious”, “bling”, “gangsta”, “backpacker” and all the rest have always said more about the needs of business than the needs of music anyway, but the unity displayed by rappers around the Occupy movement may signal that these distinctions are finally headed for the dustbin.
Two particular heavy-hitters in the underground (“conscious” is too tame a label; “militant” might be better), have already been moved to release mix-tapes primarily inspired by Occupy. #OccupyTheAirwaves, released in mid-October by Bronx duo Rebel Diaz, is what one familiar with their work would expect: thick, eclectic beats overlaid with deftly overlaid with lyrics channeled through their own Chilean revolutionary upbringing into supporting the burgeoning movement. Meanwhile, Immortal Technique, who has been a regular fixture at Occupy Wall Street since its inception, has released The Martyr, a mix-tape dripping with his signature sneering rage directed against “The Rich Man’s World (1%).”
Both mix-tapes have received almost overnight popularity—not just from the wide circuit of hip-hop sites, but from outlets who before turned a blind eye to these artists’ impressive work. On October 17th, David Mongomery of The Washington Post (whose music coverage can hardly be called “cutting edge”) featured Rebel Diaz in his piece on songs inspired by Occupy and quoted lyrics from their track “We the 99%.” The very next day, as if to highlight just how out of touch and confused the mainstream media have become, The New York Times published an article where author James C. McKinley chortled on about how Occupy Wall Street “[has] yet to find an anthem.”
For his own part, the buzz drummed up by The Martyr on the hip-hop and indie music blogs landed Immortal Technique an all-too-rare interview with MTV News where he shared a take on today’s hip-hop—and indeed the world in general—that may have made a few of the network’s execs squirm:
“As a revolutionary, there are certain aspects of the ego that have to die. We have to lose this sense of ‘self, self, self’ all the time, which is very hard because hip-hop in itself as a genre is really centered around one’s self. Like ‘I’m the best person in the world, I’m the best rapper, I’ve got more money than you.’ You know? It’s interesting to see the public’s reaction to that; they’re singing along with the lyrics like they’re the richest person, like they have money too, and then they go home to, like, a hovel!”
If Occupy has provided a platform that’s lifted hip-hop’s underground soldiers into the limelight, then so has it given mainstream artists dissatisfied with their own chains a forum with which to speak out. The best glimpse of this came not from Perry, Simmons or Kanye, but still, more than a month later, from the example of Lupe Fiasco.
A year ago, Lupe didn’t have much of a voice at all. Sure, he had Grammys under his belt and The Cool had gone gold. But he had also been battling with Atlantic Records to even get a release date for his next album. Label executives had always been clumsy at handling Lu; a straight-edge Muslim whose rhymes have always reflected his parents’ anti-establishment Black Panther politics doesn’t exactly fit with their conception of what sells, and they had repeatedly rejected the material he put in front of them. It was only after fans threatened to protest outside Atlantic’s headquarters that a March release was announced. Even then, Lupe was open about how unhappy he was with some of the material on what became Lasers.
What was seen on 11 October at the BET Hip-Hop Awards, however, was a fundamentally different Lupe Fiasco. Like The Economist, like MTV and the New York Times, BET is obviously no bastion of radicalism. In fact, there are those who argue that if any force in popular culture as come close to completely sterilizing hip-hop’s rebel spirit, it’s been Robert L. Johnson’s multimillion dollar TV empire.
And yet, somehow, in the midst of this enemy territory, Lupe managed to perform “Words I Never Said” (a song that already stirred some controversy for its unblinking criticism of Obama’s silence during the ‘09 bombardment of Gaza). Not only was he wearing a t-shirt with “#Occupy” emblazoned across the front, but with a Palestinian flag-scarf hanging from his mic stand. In the background hung a jumbo-tron bluntly flashing words like “War on terror… Bull****,” “Ghetto” and “Take Your Home Away.” And just for good measure, instead of Skylar Grey, the song’s hook was sung by Erykah Badu wearing that most villified and misunderstood symbols of post-9/11 America: a burqa.
No doubt that pulling off a performance like this takes some guts. It’s entirely possible that Lupe was planning on performing “Words I Never Said” anyway, but closer look at the song’s lyrics, however, reveal timeliness:
“I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it take to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
Uhh, And a bunch of other cover ups
Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts then, wait here comes the uppercut
The school was garbage in the first place, that’s on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper-crust
You get it then they move it so you never keeping up enough”
More than just a few quibbles here and there, this song attempts a worldview that blames the whole system from top to bottom (even seemingly drifting toward conspiracy theory with the “building 7” line, which Lupe has clarified he included to provide a context of mistrust, not because he actually buys what the 9/11 Truthers have to say).
Here, in the midst of so much corporate banality and spectacle, were the artistic and political margins being thrust back into the center. What a mere year ago might have been a place where artists like Lupe Fiasco sought to tone it down became a place to say “screw it” and let his flag fly… literally. After donating fifty tents to Occupy Wall Street, visiting several other occupations and defending them repeatedly in the media, there’s no doubt that the movement has his back, and the inspiration swings both ways.
Speaking with AllHipHop.com’s Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur, Lupe said: “[w]e always have these kinds of eras or these philosophies or these events that we kind of hold dear to and always go back to as we start to try and plan our future, what we use as kind of a precedent to make our decisions upon. I think the Occupy movement is going to be that… This is a new flag, representing the new kind of era or a new generation. The youth of the generation to come is going to use this as a precedent to deal with the way they live their lives.”
Self-aware as he is, Lupe certainly knows that this current generation stands on the broad shoulders of yesterday’s cultural revolutionaries. Forty years ago, while serving a sentence for possession in Jackson Prison, John Sinclair, manager of the MC5, UP!, Rationals and other radical rock bands of the ‘60s, wrote about the groundbreaking potential of soul and rock music: “I mean the music says it all, it’s a precise metaphor for the situation and just to hear Richard Penniman scream ‘Womp-bob-a-loo-momp-a-wompan-bam-boom!’ into the face of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles and the New York Yankees is enough to get the whole rest of the picture.”
Even in Sinclair’s far-out, hippie-fied language, it’s not hard to get exactly what he means. Art, after all, can’t make a revolution by itself, but it’s also impossible to have a revolution without art. Only time will tell where exactly the Occupy movement is headed, but even at this early hour it’s already become an indisputable part of our culture. No matter what one thinks about Occupy Wall Street or its nationwide counterparts, there can be little doubt that its very existence represents a “before” and “after” kind of moment.
There’s a reason we remember these moments in such a holistic way, why it’s impossible to think of Civil Rights without Odetta or Vietnam without Santana. It’s because during these great upheavals, when people cross that line from being spectators to actors, culture in general takes on a more vital, immediate and dynamic existence. It’s because in moments like these, everything means so much more than it once did, and the people who might have once shrugged their shoulders now believe they have an ability to re-shape the world in their own interests. In the broadest sense, that’s what Occupy is.
Forty years from now, people will be writing books on the art and music, literature and culture that came out of this moment in time. They’ll be able to do so because a movement of ordinary people made it possible.
