1. Joey Bada$$ - “BABYLON (Feat. Chronixx)
We’re here. We’ve finally made it. The song that, in my humble opinion, was the best song of 2017. I’ve already written my praise for this album as a whole earlier on this list, but even amongst all of that greatness this song finds a way to transcend the rest. It’s on a whole other level, possessing that sort of polished rawness that all of my favorite songs seems to have, where emotion is not erased, but rather enhanced, through the lens of pristine production.
Similar to the rest of the album, this song tackles the structural and systematic racism and racial inequalities that continue to pervade and exist within America. However, any swagger and braggadocio that may have existed earlier on in the record has been stripped bare. It’s almost as if, after all of the effort and hope, Joey is exhausted. The entire album he’s been trying to do something positive, to name and face the problem – to help and lead his people, and yet now, in a moment of crushing clarity, he’s confronted by the full scope of what he’s up against and momentarily shaken by its overwhelming weight. It’s akin to the realization that your ramming your head against a brick wall, and once that realization hits, you can either take into account your own finite existence and stop, or you can ram all the harder, hoping that even if you can’t bring down the wall, then at least your effort will inspire others or maybe even weaken that wall for future generations.
Joey chooses to keep ramming. You can sense the desperation within his voice. It’s dripping from every line, blurring and tearing at his spirit, trying to inundate and break it, and yet through it all he perseveres, he presses on, turning the pain into passion and the hopelessness into resilience. Nowhere is this more clear than in the first verse, when he goes all in against police brutality and injustice.
“Turn on to CNN, look at what I see again
It’s another black man died at the white hand of justice
To tell the truth, man, I’m fucking disgusted
I fear for the lives for my sisters, my brothers
Less fortunate than I, let’s formulate a plan
I’m sick of holding grudges, I’m loading in all my slugs and
Aiming it at you judges, fuck the cops
Fuck the system and the government, you fuckers not
Protecting and serving
You more like damaging and hurting
And letting off shots ‘till you motherfuckers certain
He ain’t breathing, you made it clear
Fuck your breath, nigga, don’t even deserve air
Don’t even deserve shit, don’t even deserve nothing
If black lives really mattered you niggas would do something
Instead we mean nothing, in fact we being hunted
They don’t want us in abundance
They know there’s strength in the numbers
That’s why they gave you off
The time is coming, no discussion
If you ain’t got a gun then you better start runnin'“
His voice becomes emotion incarnate. The rawness and the passion is undeniable. It’s not just a song. Its a plea and a battle cry. You can sense the overwhelming frustration of being surrounded by a dominant culture that not only shows indifference to your claims, but actual hostility. It’s a culture that praises and protects the killers, that would rather deny any wrongdoing in an attempt to avoid the deep and difficult soul searching that it would take to address and amend it. A culture that would rather preserve the status quo and some abstract notion of honor and sacrifice instead of attempting to achieve actual justice and equality. A culture that is so frightened, hateful, stubborn, and ignorant that it chooses to create slogans that obfuscate (all lives matter) and counter (blue lives matter) your own simple claim that “black lives matter”. Joey’s voice carries all of that. It’s laced with all of the pain, tragedy, frustration, resilience, and anger of a people continuously denied full personhood.
It’s a moment that hits all the harder in the wake of Eric Garner’s killer escaping without punishment. America has a problem, and only once all of us realize and acknowledge its existence, and begin to collectively bang our heads against the brick wall, will we be able to fracture and dismantle the hold it has over us.
