INTER-SECTION: FREEDOM SONG
by Brittany CampbellTaking the Metro Red Line to Hollywood/Highland for the All Black Lives Matter march on Sunday, June 14, 2020, someone’s speaker blares “Obligated to a system/ Getting less then you’re deserving/ Who made up these schools, I say/ Who made up these rules, I say/ Animal conditioning, oh just to keep us as a slave” – Lauryn Hill MTV Unplugged May 7, 2002. Jackie turns to me and ask’s “Are they listening to Tyree’s Freedom Papers Playlist?”
Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, but the revolution is streaming. What does it mean to protest in a time when we are unable to gather to hear live music? Tyree Boyd-Pates, a black millennial activist and historian, was driven to produce an apple music playlist. It’s method of distribution? The Freedom Papers, a toolkit to help verify one’s free status in America – despite the reality of racist & oppressive systems. I may never know if that stranger was just playing Ms. Hill, or indeed had received the Freedom Paper’s but that day I realized the power of Freedom songs.
Art as activism yields unlimited potential, and often those who oppose the political or social issues addressed see this potential as a threat. Lauryn Hill recorded her MTV Unplugged special on July 21, 2001, but it was not released until almost a year later. “Given the strong political undertones and conspiracy theories presented within the work Lauryn performed, MTV felt it was insensitive to air it near the time of that tragic event. So, it sat for a while and aired in 2002, almost a year to the date of its initial recording.”1 I am not here to argue if MTV made the right decision in terms of an American’s audience sensitivity. But, how are we as Americans defining our “American Audience”? Who and what is censored, and for whose safety? I will argue that the uncomfortable history of race/racism and religious intolerance has been intentionally suppressed to keep a white audience comfortable. Art and creative expression have always been reliant on technology and access. In the early 2000’s MTV & VH1 had the market cornered on the packaging of music & television for easy distribution to a loyal audience.
While the political critiques of Kanye West and concern for the danger of his Presidential “campaign” certainly have their merits, there is true genius in the way he has packed and distributed the stifled history of race in America into #1 singles. “On his debut album The College Dropout (2004), his single “All Falls Down” interpolated Ms. Hill’s “The Mystery of Iniquity” also from her MTV Unplugged. In two years, he was able to take an examination of the black community in America that had been censored by MTV to an MTV nominated Best New Artist in a Video.
West continues his empire of black culture built on the foundation of powerful female activists in the track “Blood on the Leaves” Yeezus (2013) by sampling Nina Simone’s 1965 rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”.
Recorded in 1939, Columbia records gave Holiday permission to record the song elsewhere as the label feared the reaction of Southern retail record stores.
The track was banned on the radio and consequently exposure came by either seeing Holiday perform live, or by word of mouth. Radio being the only technology for distribution of the time had the power to silence what most historians now consider the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
81 years later on Thursday, June 25, 2020 Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to adopt a resolution to “recognize racism as a root cause of poverty and constricted economic mobility.”2 While this declaration is not without sentiment, words are evidently not enough.
Freedom music has been and still is an essential form of political expression in the U.S., so pardon me City Council but as politicians I expect your form of racial course correction to come as public policy.
Leave the declarations for artists and activists they have left us plenty to choose from:
“Do we expect the system made for the elect/ To possibly judge correct? / Properly serve and protect?”
“Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar tree”
““Can’t you see it / Can’t you feel it / It’s all in the air / I can’t stand the pressure much longer” ”
““Rubber bullets bouncin’ off me / Made a picket sign off your picket fence / Take it as a warning””
1 https://www.revolt.tv/2017/5/10/20819135/we-weren-t-ready-for-lauryn-hill-s-unplugged-album-in-more-ways- than-one
2 https://ktla.com/news/local-news/l-a-city-council-declares-racism-a-public-health-crisis/