28. Joyner Lucas - “I’m Not Racist”

There are certain songs that immediately have a power to them. Where you listen to them and everything else suddenly stops. The world fades away and your left entranced by the gravity of the ensuing sound. This is one of those songs.

The first time I saw this video I was blown away. It was an experience as inspiring as it was uncomfortable. At the time, America had just made it through a year of increasing tension, fear, hate, and uncertainty, and in the midst of all that it was almost as this song acted as a salve – and I don’t meant that it provided some sort of healing or anything, but rather that it provided comfort and a glimpse of hope in an increasingly negative world. It was the hope that good could come out out of all of this – that actual art could emerge to depict and challenge the upheaval of the oppressive and newly forming status quo.

Now I by no means think that this song is perfect. It has its faults and shortcomings – the most noticeable being that it seemingly compares white supremacy/fragility and actual structural and systematic racism and violence with feelings of black disillusionment, survival, resistance, and prejudice. In other words, it promotes a false sense of equivalency by seeming to say that the effect is somehow equal to the cause, when in actuality the cause is what should always be held to a greater level of responsibility, due to the fact that it holds actual power and controls all of the avenues to meaningful change.

However, I do think that this song provides a perfect introduction to concepts of race and power. I also like how it advocates for starting a dialogue rather than immediately promoting radical opposition – which, although subject to criticism, I believe is the only way that we can achieve permanent and transformative change amongst the average person. That being said, all of those rich and capitalistic billionaires and politicians, as well as the racist systems and laws they preserve, are a completely different story. They don’t deserve grace and understanding, because they are not our peers, but rather a very clear and cognisant enemy who benefits from maintaining an amoral, unjust, and unequal distribution of wealth and power. Sorry, oligarchic ologopolies (that’s fun to say) upset me and set me off on tangents, but back to my point – this song sort of functions like a 100 level course in college. It doesn’t solve. It summarizes. Of course the material could go deeper and get more academic and nuanced, but at the end of the day it’s a song, not an essay. And as a song, it goes deeper than most, especially those made by artists of the same age as Joyner Lucas. He could choose to rap about nothing more than violence, women, wealth, and drugs (for their own sake), and yet he chooses to make a statement. To hearken back to the roots of Hip-Hop, and use the genre as a force for change and a purveyor of social and political commentary. It’s refreshing, and most importantly invigorating, as we stumble through these viscous years of Trump. We don’t need any more vapid and inane preludes to dystopic escapism a la songs like “Gucci Gang”. What we need are more songs like this – songs that use music to sharpen the senses rather than dull them.