Superstars like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne — fitful allies in the fight for civil rights — may be suffering from outrage fatigue.
Ethan Miller / Via Reuters
Like most people who rap for a living, J. Cole, 29, never experienced the worst of Ferguson, Mo. He never smelled the awful musk of tear gas, or feared for his life in a McDonald's parking lot. His connection to Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old slain in the St. Louis suburb by a police officer 10 days ago, stops at his brown skin and love of hip-hop. But still he wrote a song.
"Be Free," recorded and released less than a week after Brown's death, is a punch in the gut: all mournful keyboards and pained, cracking vocals. Cole sings as if the loss of Brown's life is personal and momentous, like his own humanity has been bound up, gagged, and set on the brink. The song's anguish manages to read as authentic, and it has resonated as such with many onlookers who have watched what's happening in Ferguson from live streams and Twitter feeds and struggled to find words.
"Are we all alone? Fighting on our own?" he pleads, in between real, heartbreaking audio excerpts of the testimony of Brown's friend, Dorian Johnson. "All we want to do is take the chains off, all we want to do is take the chains off, man."
Protest songs in the wake of a crisis, from Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl, to Creedence Clearwater Revival and Vietnam, are an American tradition. As an art form, they distill the anger and confusion of unjust circumstances into cathartic, relatable bursts: disaffection in digest. In hip-hop, protest songs have most often been concerned with civil rights — a logical function of a music that was invented and is still, mostly, ruled by historically disadvantaged people.
In the late '80s, Public Enemy and NWA defined themselves in part by raging against an earlier wave of police brutality against black people. In 2005, Lil Wayne and Mos Def recorded some of the most pointed and potent songs of their prolific careers in response to the Bush administration's indifference to Hurricane Katrina survivors. And in 2013, Jay Z made a habit of dedicating his song "Forever Young" to slain black teenager Trayvon Martin.