That came on the heels of the senseless vigilante-like killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia by three white men (one a former officer of the law) and the mistaken-identity murder of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Ky.Īnd while these murders – and the pattern of killers’ acquittals that have tainted similar cases throughout history – continue to dominate headlines, they are only the tip of an iceberg of systemic racism in policing that has been the source of anger and frustration in black communities for ages – anger that has been intensified by the realization that even video evidence of these encounters haven’t proved sufficient to flip the scales of justice in our favor, defying all logic at a minimum and any law of averages at most.Īnd so the civil unrest continues with the nation now in its fourth week of protests against police use of excessive force against blacks, just as another hashtag (Brooks) is added to the long list of names that have gained international attention on this issue for years during the social media era.Īs this is a music blog, perhaps no one can retell today’s headlines – musically speaking – as grippingly as today’s young hip-hop artists, particularly with many of them hailing from the same hard-hit communities where the acts of brutality and unfair police tactics often play out daily. The issue of racism in America has been front and center ever since the merciless killing of Floyd – a 46-year-old unarmed black man – by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25. Cole’s controversial new “Snow on Tha Bluff” is one of ten tracks featured in this article. So I shelved several paragraphs intended to highlight the worldwide outpouring of support for the current movement to get right to the point of this article: to highlight ten songs (and their artists) who can tell the story of the black man’s plight in America as well as anyone can.
It was going to reflect on George Floyd and the international wave of protests his merciless killing sparked more than three weeks ago and how I sensed that sweeping social change (finally) seemed imminent.īut with the country continuing to be in turmoil and the latest unjustified killing of a black man – 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks who was shot in the back in Atlanta – just days old, I’m reminded that change, if it happens, will continue to be glacially slow in coming.
I initially wrote a really long intro to this piece. Like the late Nina Simone once famously said, “an artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”
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