Black Power: Music of a Revolution

Released: 2004

Lyrically, the contemporary hip-hop/R&B landscape is a wasteland. Scratch that. Content-wise, the lyrics of contemporary hip-hop and R&B are a wasteland. There’s still a clever turn-of-phrase here and there, and some artists like the semi-retired Jay Z and Nas can create some pretty intricate wordplay in their songs. The substance of these tracks, however, leaves much to be desired. Singing about one’s humps, or another’s “laffy taffy,” or perhaps the magic of “sex weed,” doesn’t really make for compelling music. Now, there is always room for the salacious, the absurd, and the pornographic in pop music – to expect high-minded treatises on love, liberty, and secular humanism is to be isolated from the lingua franca of 13-24 year olds. The pervasiveness of these bottom-scraping lyrics, however, is a bit depressing. I think it says a lot that Kanye West’s “Golddigger,” an OK song in which our man both praises and criticizes a woman of expensive taste and gives shout-outs to “pre-nups,” is considered one of the lyrical high-water marks of ’05 pop (Now when he accuses the government of spreading AIDS in “Heard ‘Em Say?” That’s awesome).

In stark contrast to this milieu stands Black Power: Music of a Revolution. Compiled from recordings from the golden era of black activism, Black Power finds both mainstream and fringe artists promoting economic and civil justice for African-Americans. Thirty five years on, it’s surprising to hear a band like the Temptations doing “Message From a Black Man,” or the Chi-Lites singing “Give More Power To the People,” and find out that said songs were Top 40 hits (or, in the case of the Isley Brothers’ “Fight the Power,” Top 10). Admittedly, these compositions were not incendiary. They dealt with the movement in rather general terms, vacillating between the demands of the O’Jays “Give the People What They Want,” to the self-improvement anthem of the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself.”

For the unadulterated take on black power, one must turn to the audio clips scattered throughout the CD. Featuring snippets of speeches from Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, and other leading figures of the movement, these sound bites represent black power at its most vital and extreme. What’s fascinating about these men and women was their desire to overthrow not only the country’s socially entrenched racism, but also its economic system. Capitalism was built upon slavery and had led to the social stratification of African Americans; therefore, only through the end of capitalism could any equality be achieved. Their ideal methods of bringing about this revolution, primarily violent in content, ostracized them from other leaders of the movement, and in turn buried their radical social agenda.

With the cyclical nature of the music industry, there’s always a chance that socially relevant material will trickle back into the hip-hop milieu. It’s been over fifteen years since Public Enemy, KRS-One, and the “Golden Age of Hip-Hop” consistently tackled country’s social ills. Until their successors arrive, we’ll be stuck with “Grillz” and “Stay Fly.” Lucky us.