Watch the Music of 2017

The true voice of the oppressed.

I just watched the Evolution of Hip-Hop on Netflix today and was reminded, once again, of my people’s struggle to remain heard in the face of oppression.

This isn’t the place for a history lesson, but the underlying principle is that hip-hop music’s purpose is to reflect the reality of life. Whether that was about gang life, police oppression or using sex and parties as the primary means of escapism. Love it or hate it, that’s what’s going on and that’s what the music will represent.

You can try to suppress it with a tipper sticker, you can try to ignore it or hide it but hip hop has proven to be one of the most pervasive pop cultural phenomena of our day. Its influence reaches every continent. Rap isn’t always pleasant. It’s not really about good or wholesome things. It’s a product of circumstance even more than it is a promoter of any one lifestyle of choice.

Every decade changes rap music. The last 8 years have seen a huge evolution. Pop music has all but uniformly replaced bridges with a rap verse. The biggest figures in hip hop have all but forgotten the life they came from. Rap became benign.

That changes this year. Starting with Run the Jewels 3.

Killer Mike and El P bring a darkness to this album that just feels congruent with the age we’re now in. This age that has been building. It didn’t start on November 8th with Donald Trump but that was really the capstone to the insane amounts of police violence and growing neglect for black communities. It snuck up on the people who weren’t watching. Myself included, but this year we’ll see a stark return to what emerged as gangster rap.

The second Run the Jewels 3 begins you know it’s serious. It sets the tone. Watch the music in 2017. It won’t depict a world that ought to be, only the world that is to so many people, who can’t escape it, who have no choice, who have no bootstraps to begin with. Watch the music in 2017.