27. CyHi The Prynce - “No Dope on Sundays (Feat. Pusha T)”
This album was probably one of the biggest and most pleasant surprises I encountered in 2017. It was on a whole other level, like climbing into a time machine and returning to the roots of Hip-Hop, back to when there was a tangible and striving spirit guiding the lyrics and contorting the emotions of every artist involved. It’s an album that gladly takes on the legacy of its forebears to create a collection of incisive, intelligent, and authentic works of art. It’s street poetry in its purest sense. Every line has direction, whether its painting a picture or dropping a clever witticism, there’s an underlying purpose guiding every decision. CyHi is simultaneously laying his heart bare, preaching from the pulpit, and expounding from the lectern – and the combination of all three creates a gravity that’s hard to ignore.
This track in particular is a cinematic experience, almost like an old time radio show that tells a story through nothing but sound and asks the imagination to fill in the rest. It’s this sort of experience that speaks to listeners. Whether you’re a POC who has shared the lived experiences of CyHi and can meet him halfway, interweaving your own stories, memories, and hardships with his own, or a middle class white person like myself, who instead sees Hip-Hop as a primary source, as a window into a silenced or demonized and misunderstood state of reality that I have little to no experience with and probably never will.
Either way its a valuable experience and part of why Hip-Hop is such an indispensable form of art. It gives voice to the voiceless and takes control of a narrative that for far too long was repeatedly filtered and contorted through the pervasive apparatus of a white-dominated media, politics, and academia. It was this apparatus that depicted black culture in such a negative light, highlighting its faults and wrongfully ascribing blame, taking victims and portraying them as the perpetrators, and in doing so further causing and perpetuating the very aspects it criticized. This is why the latest bastardization of Hip-Hop by capitalistic interests (the majority of which are white-dominated) is so devastating and heartbreaking. Not only is it eliminating meaningful and powerful content, but its appealing to the lowest common denominator and praising addiction, materialism, and misogyny for their own sake, without any of the context or depth and duality that used to always coexist alongside it. It’s new age colonialism, a more subtle form of racism and a holdover of America’s slave-holding past, where contracts are signed, ownership is given, and negative, frivolous, and damaging lifestyles are glorified and promoted while the real struggles and resilience of lived experiences are either ignored or minimized.
Luckily CyHi is able to transcend this and create a transformational work of art. Here’s to hoping we’ll see a resurgence of more albums like this, because as we should all know, the struggle is far from over.
