A Song Born When Pain Is Still Fresh
In 1970, it took a few weeks
for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to record and release the song
“Ohio” in response to the shooting of unarmed college students at Kent
State University.
On Friday, just days after the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., J. Cole’s somber protest song “Be Free”
spread around the world in a matter of hours, fueled by social media
and the hip-hop world’s intense online discourse about Mr. Brown, an
18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer last Saturday.
Mr.
Cole, a 29-year-old rapper from North Carolina, posted the song early
Friday to the online audio platform SoundCloud, which lets users upload
tracks and easily share them through social media. By late afternoon it
had been listened to more than 250,000 times and, with feelings still
raw over the situation in Ferguson, it began to quickly ricochet around
the Internet.
“All
we want to do is take the chains off,” Mr. Cole sings in the track, his
voice breaking over mournful keyboards. “All we want to do is be free.”
J.
Cole’s “Be Free” was released, publicized and commented on with
remarkable speed; according to Billboard, it had become the most
talked-about track on Twitter by 10 a.m. Friday, a little more than six
hours after it was released. Ann Powers, NPR’s music critic, called it “the first fully formed protest song I’ve heard addressing the death of Mike Brown” and said it was “evocative of Nina Simone.”
Mr.
Cole’s song punctuated what was already a strong reaction in hip-hop
circles, with artists, fans and critics going online to express
themselves and debate the issue. And it followed the hip-hop world’s
pitched reaction to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, which drew musical responses by Public Enemy, Dead Prez, Mos Def and others.
“In
the many, many instances where tragedies like this have happened,” said
Matthew Trammell, an associate editor at The Fader, a music and fashion
magazine, “people in hip-hop immediately feel a responsibility to use
the platform they have to raise a certain perspective that is not the
default.”
On Instagram, the rapper Killer Mike posted a picture of Mr. Brown’s mother and stepfather along with an impassioned note
of sympathy that was noted by BuzzFeed, BET and many other outlets. On
Tuesday, Wiz Khalifa and Young Jeezy performed in St. Louis wearing
“R.I.P. Mike Brown” T-shirts. Young Jeezy also posted a picture
of himself at a looted Ferguson convenience store, writing: “The answer
is not tearing down our own neighborhoods and communities, the answer
is goin to the source of the problem in numbers.”
Tef Poe,
a St. Louis rapper, drew wide attention this week for a barrage of
online posts, while at the same time thousands of people on Twitter used
the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown to criticize the stereotyping of young African-Americans by law enforcement and the news media.
Mr. Brown was an aspiring rapper
himself, posting his own songs to SoundCloud, a streaming platform that
is popular among young listeners and artists — particularly in dance
and hip-hop — for its YouTube-like ease in uploading and sharing audio.
Mr. Brown’s songs were even subject to insta-analysis by The Riverfront
Times, a St. Louis weekly, which at first characterized his lyrics as
“gangster” but later removed that word after criticism.
In a blog post
unveiling the track, Mr. Cole wrote candidly about Mr. Brown’s death
and the feelings it inspired in him. “That coulda been me, easily,” he
wrote. “It could have been my best friend. I’m tired of being
desensitized to the murder of black men.”
The
lyrics to the song allude to Trayvon Martin’s death, with Mr. Cole
singing, “I will stand my ground.” But Mr. Trammell of Fader noted that
“Be Free” is not a straightforward protest song, avoiding political
commentary in favor of an emotional, “fatigued” response to Mr. Brown’s
death and all that it represents.
“For
hip-hop artists, a lot of whom have come from places or circumstances
where occurrences like this are not uncommon, they feel a very personal
reaction to it,” Mr. Trammell said. “It’s not about political
affiliations, or thoughts about the police or the president. It’s that
these are the same kinds of people in the same kinds of places they grew
up in.”
Mr. Cole on Friday declined to be interviewed about “Be Free.”
“He’d like the song to stand on its own,” a spokeswoman said.
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