This week’s classic comes from Common’s 1997 album One Day It’ll All Make Sense, and features the legendary Lauryn Hill on the hook.
Common puts down his poetry on a beat from Chicago producer No I.D. which samples “A Song For You” by Chicago soul icon Donny Hathaway, which seamlessly leads into Lauryn Hill singing some lines from Stevie Wonder’s song “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” for the hook.
The theme of the song is abortion and unplanned pregnancy, and Common’s autobiographical lyrics provide an insider’s perspective on the difficulty and emotional intensity involved in making decisions about family and children.
Common concludes that “$315″—referring to the cost of an abortion—”aint worth your soul.”
J. Cole is like Kanye West part two. He is one of Jay-Z’s new protégés and blends a creative, witty, yet often insightful lyrical style with mediocre but effective singing and what is perhaps the most intricate and unique production/beat making capabilities since Mr. West dropped The College Dropout in 2005.
In this intimate, often painfully introspective track, J. Cole creates a vivid narrative about the issues of unplanned pregnancy and abortion which plague many people struggling to get by in low income communities across the US. He begins in the first verse by sharing the pro-abortion perspective of a single young man facing the daunting task of fatherhood and feeling vastly unprepared and incapable of performing the role of a parent. The second verse is an inspiring rebuttal from the girl’s perspective which calls the young man out for trying to escape the responsibility of fatherhood just like the way his own father had abandoned him, and accuses him of trying to play God by taking an innocent life. Ultimately, she resolves to accept her role as a mother regardless of his decision, but holds on to a desperate hope that the baby-daddy will come around.
This is far from the counterproductive misogynistic and irresponsible hedonism that people often associate with rap music, and it deserves an honest listen from anyone and everyone.
Regardless of where you stand on the issue of abortion and unplanned pregnancy, this song tells a very human story that all of us can relate to so long as we try to imagine being in the narrators’ shoes…
In this hot (and controversial) new single from his upcoming album Food & Liquor 2: The Great American Rap Album Part I, Lupe recreates the sonic landscape of Pete Rock’s hip hop classic “T.R.O.Y.” and rhymes in his typical witty political flow about the treatment of Native Americans, the adverse aspects of American consumer culture, industy, and media, and other HIGHLY pertinent themes.
The single’s artwork is a poignant graphic design which depicts an American flag except the stripes are the lines of a bar code:
Here is the point of view Lupe is driving home with the song:
“The album is meant to be my interpretation of America. Politics, society, religion, class, race, food, all across the board. It was only right that we had to have a song that was a collage of that so people got it from the door that all these different things, topics that make up America, that make us Americans, the things that influence us and the things that we influence. You needed that first record to be the embodiment of that whole piece, the whole direction that we’re going in. This record is a collage, but it’s a more like an introduction. As you get into the album, as we release new records, and hopefully we’ll release the album in a few months, you’ll see that we focus on particular issues on particular songs. We will expand on something that may have came up in the second verse of “Freedom Ain’t Free.” There will be a whole song that speaks about this particular relationship in American society, or this particular phenomenon in American society, so people can get a good direction of where the album is going. You get it all in the first joint. But it’s not necessarily angry. The whole record’s not angry. It’s not coming from an angry place, it’s coming from a serious place.”
It seems to me that what Lupe is doing with this sacred rap anthem is providing a new context on which to both engage the hip hop tradition AND to pose some vital questions about the status quo for oppressed peoples in the US today.
In that respect, what Lupe does is not unlike the way in which the Hebrew prophets and later Jesus and Paul would “sample” from the Jewish religious tradition of the Exodus and covenant with God only to “flip the script” on the flawed conventional ways of interpreting the faith in order to point to the same kind of questions about justice and love in our societies and communities.
This new video is a sneak peek from Talib’s upcoming 2012 album Prisoner of Conscience. In this video, Talib walks around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and offers up some thoughts about all the things in our culture which distract us and distort our perceptions.
While the Occupy movement which swept so rapidly across the nation has become like a faint and distant memory, long since dipping under the radar of national media attention, this video is a great reminder of what has been surely one of the most profound and stirring demonstrations of democracy that the hip hop generation has ever witnessed.
There’s a lot of talk about Hip Hop being dead or completely compromised with messages and images that fulfill corporate agendas and while that may be true in terms of what is presented on some of the largest stages around us, we should not discount the fact that everyday folks are waking up and fighting the good fight… One cat that puts in work day in and day out is…
