D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

name them. stop dodging.

Scroll back a few posts

in R&B - erykah badu, dangelo, georgia anne muldrow, cody chestnutt, cassandra wilson (if she can count), meshell

Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill released songs about Ferguson. Frank Ocean weighed in on Tumblr. Rihanna tweeted about it.

dismissing current artists as apolitical also carries the insinuation that issues like feminism and LGBT rights are somehow not proper politics, given the amount of artists, high profile and otherwise, who have been vocal about them over the past decade - far more than i remember growing up

Absolutely.

thank you – I've been having this fucking argument for years.

i feel that, as far as my own awareness matters, that explicitly political concerns in music are being felt stronger than they have since the early 90s. maybe through the 2000s i would have struggled to have named many acts who were addressing wider issues of social, political and global justice.

but i agree with what lex and dorian are saying, that you only have to delve a little deeper to reveal all sorts of things and that the buck doesn't have to stop at obvious agit-prop rock stuff.

as usual it's men who have no stake in gender and sexuality wars that pine for "political" material.

not to be all grumpy old man about it, but i dont think tweeting about it counts.

hey grumpy old men are people too.

dismissing current artists as apolitical also carries the insinuation that issues like feminism and LGBT rights are somehow not proper politics

What hip hop acts have been campaigning for feminism or LGBT?

btw, Modern Neo Feminism isn't political at all, it's a club. An identity club. They're not fighting for any cause.

like, i think theres a diff between making a statement (which i would say tweeting is) and actually making a song or writing a lyric about it.

(duh! but its still a valid observation. i mean, what is dorian lynskey going to write his volume 2 about? political tweets?)

Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill released songs about Ferguson. Frank Ocean weighed in on Tumblr. Rihanna tweeted about it.

― Re-Make/Re-Model,

Lauryn Hill? 90s rapper Lauryn Hill? Non of the acts out in last decade that you mentioned seemed to do anything more than a deleted tweet or a tumblr post.

I've often felt that capital-P 'politics' goes in and out of fashion in pop culture like waves.
Sometimes showing you have a social conscience with opinions and concerns is a part and parcel of being an artist; and to the onlooker it can feel like everything, even some instrumental music, has an inherent politics at its core.
Other times, it feels as though the wider pop sphere has little time for politics as this gets in the way of the personal. Again, I'm struggling to think of much militantly political music from the mid-late 2000s save for damp offerings by Green Day etc...

idk, a tweet in the moment might have more of an impact than a few veiled references in a song, especially considering that songs take awhile to make & release, and if they don't are often thrown together and quickly forgotten.

xp

also, just wanted to add MIA to the list of excellent, modern, political rappers.

xp Before Twitter you had to give an interview or write a song or say something during a concert to be heard. Obviously if there's another outlet to tell everyone where you stand some musicians are going to prefer that. You can't insist that only the old modes count.

And that may be why there's no volume 2 for me to do.

RT, I'm going to print out the post where I name The Game, TI, Run the Jewels, J Cole and Kendrick and staple it your head.

a$ap ferg did a ferguson song too iirc

also can we give it more than a couple of months before demanding fully thought out political statements in their music from rappers

True. How many responses to the Rodney King verdict were there by the equivalent stage? Ice Cube's The Predator didn't come out until November and the verdict was late April.

MIA is 39, she came out over 10 years ago.

what do you need? someone under 18 who has just made their first single to come out with a new 'fight the power'?

i mean, chuck d was in his early 30s when he made shut em down. would that still count?

never mind that dangelo is 40!

i can link you to some 19/20 year olds making political rap records. they're just not famous, so i guess that doesn't count?

How many responses to the Rodney King verdict were there by the equivalent stage?

what's maybe more relevant is all the LA rap about LAPD brutality/corruption that came out *before* the Rodney King incident/trial. which was quite a lot.

(not agreeing w RT btw)

Who said anything about Ferguson?

RT, I'm going to print out the post where I name The Game, TI, Run the Jewels, J Cole and Kendrick and staple it your head.

― Re-Make/Re-Model,

Again, way off, check your dates. T.I came out 15 years ago. The Game? 10 years ago, and that's really scraping the barrel I think. RTJ is just a misogynist fairly disgusting male ego trip from what I heard.

what do you need?

― StillAdvance,

I've said it enough times, anyone out in the last decade, still no one has provided.

this has been mentioned already right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXsa6y2NJ14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQs7CWKHM9w

xp Yeah you're right about songs before Rodney King, but there have been pre-Ferguson songs about police brutality like Hands Up by Vince Staples. Will that pass the Tanuki test?

Lil B addressed Ferguson during his lecture(!) at MIT

http://www.thefader.com/2014/11/22/lil-b-mit-lecture-full-transcript

this entire thread is evidence that people who make this complaint don't give a shit about political music, they give a shit about proving their generational point. also i intend to waste no further time arguing with or doing research for idiots like raccoon tanuki

This entire Black Messiah thread?

J. Cole doing "Be Free" in December on Letterman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0LNMviSTTg

how about kendrick lamar? is he allowed?

anyway, i think this thread needs to get back to discussing what dangelo did say, how he said it, rather than yet another discussion on the internets about rap not being political enough like it was in the good ol days.

I don't hear anything in that Kendrick song other than its title.

please post here What happened to socially/politically concious rappers for more of this

i don't like "i" as a track but if you don't see anything inherently political in a song that culminates in "i love myself" as the unironic chorus of a hip hop song in 2014, i can't help you

Anybody ever listen to Raheem Devaughan's 'The Love & War MasterPeace'?

i did, but not very much, i guess i admired it but nothing stuck much? political music and great music don't correlate unfortch

I think where Black Messiah does withstand those There's a Riot Goin' On comparisons is the way it feels way more politically resonant than, line by line, it really is. It creates a charged mood, a climate, where everything feels charged even if (a) the lyric has no political content and (b) you can't hear what he's singing anyway. The way he chose to frame this, with the title, the timing and the press release, was so smart. He wrote his own narrative.

xp
Yeah I appreciated the sentiments behind it but he's generally quite boring and inoffensive in a way that feels almost studied.

Actually, some of the political lyrics on Black Messiah are pretty lame on the page. Cries/lies is protest-singing 101. but he makes it sound so good.

"Crawling through a systematic maze to demise
Pain in our eyes
Strain of drownin', wading through the lies
Degradation so loud that you can't hear the sound of our cries"

R&B "message" songs tend to be frustratingly vague lyrically, even if the general import is clear enough. cf. curtis mayfield.

I think where Black Messiah does withstand those There's a Riot Goin' On comparisons is the way it feels way more politically resonant than, line by line, it really is. It creates a charged mood, a climate, where everything feels charged even if (a) the lyric has no political content and (b) you can't hear what he's singing anyway. The way he chose to frame this, with the title, the timing and the press release, was so smart. He wrote his own narrative.

― Re-Make/Re-Model, Wednesday, January 7, 2015 5:52 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i was all ready for his new amerykah pt 1 but when i heard it i was happy to ascribe that to PR nonsense and take his new amerykah pt 2

there are two remotely political songs on it and one of them i find unlistenable

That's exactly it - a Part 2 pitched as a Part 1 and boy did it work.

RTJ is just a misogynist fairly disgusting male ego trip from what I heard.

No, you're thinking about the post where you called identity politics a huge clique.

btw, Modern Neo Feminism isn't political at all, it's a club. An identity club. They're not fighting for any cause.

― ..but is he a virtuoso? (Raccoon Tanuki), Wednesday, January 7, 2015 11:52 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

remind me why you guys are even dignifying this idiot by providing cogent arguments for him to brickwall with nonsense?