Racism and slavery is a serious matter and gets twisted into different concepts. J Cole wrote and performed the song ‘Be Free’ to describe and show the emotional and physical pain African-Americans feel about it all. Throughout time there havehas been several forms of slavery, whether it’s psychological or physical. J Cole is not the only person to step up and speak on the matter, but his voice is heard around the world. In this spectacular song, Cole is most likely addressing African-Americans and people of all colors who want to change the world for the better of all colors. While performing live, Cole seemed saddened and hurt from deep down inside because he and only wants things to get better and for everyone to learn to love. Although he presents this song about being free, I believe J Cole is talking talks about police brutality and racism the majority of the time. During the song, there is a chorus in the back and at certain parts it says, “Eyewitnesses account from Dorian Johnson.” I believe Cole useshas this to add emotion and power to his song. Heand he also talks about what had …show more content…
happened to Michael Brown, Dorian Johnson's friend whothat was killed by police. Cole adds so much power and emotionally connects with his audience when he starts to rap the story about how Brown died; especially when he says, “the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and he fired 7 more shots and my friend died.” Just that one lyrical context alone had Cole tearing up on stage. Police brutality is a real thing nowadays, but Cole doesn’t only discuss that;, he also talks about mental slavery by saying everyone wants to be “free” and take the chains offby “taking the chains off.” The structural context of this song is just pure genius.
Cole’s main chorus in this song is, “All we wanna do is take the chains off, All we wanna do is break the chains off, All we wanna do is be free,” which clearly demonstrates that there is slavery within. He wants to break the chains off and be free instead of feeling trapped and stuck in this almost absurd world, as he describes it. Finally, Cole brilliantly pulls the emotion out by saying, “That there ain't no gun they make that can kill my soul.” A person’s soul is one’s true self. It’s ultimately the spiritual embodiment of whom you really are. It contains everything that makes you, including your morals and
beliefs. Being a lyrical genius, Cole was able to also add the protest of peace over violence into his song. By saying, “Please give me a chance, I don't wanna dance,” Cole is basically stating that police should allow young black boys to have a chance to live. Many do not want to get caught up in the perpetual lifestyle of killing and violence and only want peace. Ultimately Cole wants the people to understand where all of the African Americans are coming from and to promote peace because he is tired of seeing his friends and fellow brothers dying. Not only did J Cole speak up, but he also intelligently and respectfully brought attention to police brutality, promoting peace, and mental slavery. Cole presents that African Americans are indulged with these concepts every single day, whether it’s on purpose or not. This song was emotionally rapped by J Cole and he was able to pull a lot of attention towards it, just like he did with his other song ‘crooked smiles’. He is a brilliant writer and performer whothat writes from his heart in every single song.
The systematic oppression of the underprivileged is an unescapable loop that keeps people chained. J Cole’s album, 4 Your Eyez Only, shows the difficulties of escaping a difficult lifestyle. J Cole, a young North Carolina based rapper, focuses on the consequences that come with choosing to live a life of crime. Although living this lifestyle is wrong, many are forced into this life and tend to glorify it because it is all they know. J. Cole challenges this notion while also realizing the oppression he is facing while trying to escape the life. He chooses to tell the album from the perspective of his dead friend, who chose this lifestyle. Although this album is dark, it has an underlying tone of hope.
The book, The Spirituals and the Blues, by James H. Cone, illustrates how the slave spirituals and the blues reflected the struggle for black survival under the harsh reality of slavery and segregation. The spirituals are historical songs which speak out about the rupture of black lives in a religious sense, telling us about people in a land of bondage, and what they did to stay united and somehow fight back. The blues are somewhat different from in the spirituals in that they depict the secular aspect of black life during times of oppression and the capacity to survive. James H. Cone’s portrayal of how the spirituals and the blues aided blacks through times of hardship and adversity has very few flaws and informs the reader greatly about the importance of music in the lives of African-Americans. The author aims to both examine the spirituals and blues as cultural expressions of black people and to reflect on both the theological and sociological implications of these songs.
We typically think of slaves as a mistreated African American. Thats not all they were, they sang, they read, they were a huge part of our history we don't even acknowledge. They contributed a lot to our music, you could say they were the roots of jazz and blues. Slaves sang almost every moment of their life, there is many different categories of their music, but one of the most interesting is field hollers. Field hollers contain a lot of information on the slave(s). This means emotion is strong in these songs. You can find three main subjects in their tunes, those three are; sad, happy, informative, or passing time.
While the formal abolition of slavery, on the 6th of December 1865 freed black Americans from their slave labour, they were still unequal to and discriminated by white Americans for the next century. This ‘freedom’, meant that black Americans ‘felt like a bird out of a cage’ , but this freedom from slavery did not equate to their complete liberty, rather they were kept in destitute through their economic, social, and political state.
McBride’s idea of limitation is prominent during the time of slavery for African Americans, as these same limitations are present during the twenty first century. The power of limitations that African American Women faced during the time of slavery hindered their ability to gain freedom, as freedom for slaves was the ultimate American Dream. James McBride exemplifies this in the novel Song Yet Sung as the first character that we meet is Liz, whom happens to be African American Women. When McBride first introduced Liz to the audience, she was running away from her master as she was chasing the American dream known as freedom.
" From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city...isolated, cut off from memory...they arrive stunned with a song worth singing..their pockets lined with fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow..shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as a free man of definite and sincere worth.
African-American slaves may not have had the formal education that many of their white slave owners possessed, but they intuitively knew that the labor they toiled through each and every day was unjust. This dynamic of unfairness brought about a mindset in which slaves would critique the workings of slavery. To many people’s understanding, slavery was an invasively oppressive institution; Levine however, noted, “for all its horrors, slavery was never so complete a system of psychic assault that it prevented the slaves from carving out independent cultural forms” . Slave spirituals were a part of the independent cultural form that enslaved African-Americans produced; these songs had numerous functions and critiquing slavery served as one of
Cole uses a slang that is being used in this generation to help people understand the message being expressed in the lyrics. This slang is mostly understood by the younger generation. His music falls in the genre of hip-hop and rap. Cole also uses expletive language to emphasize certain parts of his song.
In the song “When Will We Be Paid for the Work We’ve Done?” by the Staple Singers, they use pop music and culture to spread their message. The song talks about how African Americans have done all this work for the white men but they don’t receive any repayment for it. The Staples Singers focus on many different aspects of African American history throughout the song. They used this song to reflect on African American history during the times of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. They also used the catchy tune to engage people and unite them by singing along in protest. The catchy tune that made the song easy to sing along irritated the officers that had to control the protests. This song was an easy way to express the thoughts of unequal
As Kendrick entered the stage shackled to his black comrades with a soulful saxophone playing in the background, it is obvious that the imagery of imprisonment was a commentary on incarceration in America and its similarities with slavery. By amplifying this modern twist on slavery, Kendrick provokes American viewers to reflect on the struggles that black Americans still go through today. At the start of his performance he goes on to rap “I’m African-American — I’m African” as if he was correcting himself. This isn’t surprising as black identity is hard to establish in a country that implicitly detests you, but explicitly fetishizes your culture. Stuart Hall discusses this in his text when he states, “’the primitive is a modern problem, a crisis in cultural identity’…the modernist construction of primitivism, the fetishistic recognition and disavowal of the primitive difference” (Hall 125). There is no wonder why Kendrick, like many African-Americans, finds comfort in placing his identity with the mother land rather than his true country of origin. How can the black multitude stand in solidarity with a country who will continuously praise black culture but refuse to recognize the black struggle? Kendrick Lamar then conjures imagery of Africa, where he danced and rapped in front of a raging bonfire, one of the most powerful imagery included in his entire performance. One can interpret
In the poem, he mentions black people that were treated unfairly and how many of those people are not recognized as much. He powerfully wrote: “Names lost. Know too many Trayvon Martins / Oscar Grants / and Abner Louimas, know too many / Sean Bells, and Amadou Diallos / Know too well that we are the hard-boiled sons of Emmett Till” (Lines 53-60). This quote shows how many of our black people are discriminated by their skin color are mistreated. Abner Louimas, Sean Bells and Amadou Diallos were men that were victims of police brutality and were shot several times by police officers. Specifically, Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin’s deaths were great examples as to how people were and still are racist. To take a case in point, Emmett Till who was African-American was tortured and killed because he flirted with a white woman. Trayvon Martin was a teenager who was shot and killed just because he went to grab a bag of skittles from his pocket, which the person who shot him thought he was reaching for a weapon. The many examples that Johnson makes help show how racism and stereotypes play a major role in our society because many people are still victims of discrimination. They are automatically stereotyped into a criminal who is about to do something that is illegal. In the society that we live in, blacks do not have any power, they do not get the benefit of the doubt whether or not
In the hook of the song, Kendrick reveals the contrast between the past and present of African-American life. In the past, black people have gone from being whipped by slave masters to owning “whips”, which are luxurious and flashy cars, and from slaves being put “inna chains, cah’ we black” to “imagine now, big gold chains full of rocks” as he is alluding to owning expensive jewelry made of diamond and gold. Whips and chains were tools of domination and oppression used against slaves, but Lamar highlights the certainty of the other meaning as now they represent something else- tools of a different kind of oppression. This leads to the belief that slavery stills exist in America but has shifted into the form of mental slavery. Many black youths,
Cole’s musical idols, which greatly influenced his musical style. His style captures the attention from younger generations and the adolescent population, whom also came from an uneasy childhood and along the way lost motivation. “I 'm here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don 't follow what you 've been told you 're supposed to do.” (Music times, 2014) Through this message, J. Cole constantly portrays to be an ambition seeking activist. He hopes to project hope in those who are struggling by sharing his life challenges and voicing how he overcame
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free”. Which shows how even though the Emancipation Proclamation freed the African Americans from slavery, they still are not free because of segregation. He then transitions to the injustice and suffering that the African Americans face. He makes this argument when he proclaims, “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”.
As Reed showed it in the reading “Singing Civil Rights The Freedom Song Tradition” that music played a crucial role in the civil rights movement. This song shows how African Americans were united and working to make a