“f*ck tha Police” in Historical Context
Rappers have clashed with cops for more than 30 years. Where is the hip-hop response to Ferguson and Staten Island?
With a few notable exceptions, rappers have been conspicuously absent in the response to the grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island. The Internets want to know why.
Back in 1970, CSNY’s protest anthem “Ohio” was on the radio within a few weeks of the massacre at Kent State—and that was in 1970. Those records had to be pressed up on vinyl and delivered to radio stations by actual human beings.
Theoretically, a rapper could have issued a response to #Ferguson, say, the same afternoon Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown dead in the street, or the same evening a grand jury decided he shouldn’t be charged with a crime. We have the technology.
Chuck D, who once called hip-hop the black CNN, in what’s since become one of the most shopworn cliches in the history of hip-hop journalism, often touted the Internets’ potential in this regard.
J. Cole, to his credit, actually visited Ferguson and also released an ostensibly-touching tribute that may have been the first Mike Brown song to hit the Internets, a little over a week after the shooting. “Be Free” finds the rapper, who’s often verbose to the point where people on Twitter joke about his bars putting people to sleep, singing rather than rapping—and not very well, I might add.
Two weeks after the Mike Brown shooting, The Game released “Don’t Shoot,” featuring himself, Diddy, Rick Ross and maybe 8 or 10 other people. In it, Diddy plugs Ciroc vodka and Rick Ross refers to himself as the Bawse. The song is front-loaded with the most-famous rappers, and I’m hardly familiar with the last few guys. The one time I listened to it, I cut it off after Rawse’s verse. Proceeds will be donated to Mike Brown’s family, if anyone actually buys a copy.
This indifference hasn’t always been the case. It used to be, a rapper wouldn’t just wait until an unarmed black kid was shot dead in the street, or choked out on a sidewalk, to write a song about it. He’d write a song about it before it even happened, and then he’d write another song praising himself for having such foresight. Rap music wasn’t just the black CNN: it was the black Psychic Friends Network. In fact, the history of rap music could be viewed as a litany of complaints about the police that seems to have predicted this current state of unrest.
A list of rappers who have some sort of grievance with the police could double as a list of rappers whose names aren’t Iggy Azalea and would be entirely too long, so I just picked 10. With all due respect, past and present, and without further… to do.
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
“The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five laid the blueprint for protest rap
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five were one of the first rap groups ever and the first rap group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Their song “Superrappin’” was one of the first rap records other than “Rappers Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang.
The very last verse of “Superrappin’” forms the basis of “The Message,” one of the all-time great rap protest songs. It’s precisely the kind of song the Internets have been crying out for in the wake of the Ferguson and Staten Island grand jury decisions.
Written by Melle Mel and Sugarhill Records session musician Ed Fletcher, aka Duke Bootee, “The Message” doesn’t feature anyone in the group other than Melle Mel. Fletcher brought the song to Sugarhill Records founder Sylvia Robinson, who brought the song to the group.
The group found the song difficult to rhyme to and thought it had limited commercial appeal. Even back then, rappers realized: commercial rap don’t sell! Eventually, Melle Mel realized that his verse from “Superrappin’” (“A child is born with no state of mind…”) might fit and wrote a few other verses in a similar vein.
All six members of the group appear in the video. Rahiem from The Furious Five lip syncs the verse performed on the record by Duke Bootee. Stark images of the early-80s South Bronx bring to life lyrics about broken glass everywhere and people pissing on stairs as if they just don’t care. Melle Mel, presumably, stands on that exact same staircase.
At the very end of the video, the group stand on a street corner and discuss, among other things, their plans for the evening and news that an old lady had been robbed and badly hurt. A cop car pulls up and out jumps a couple of New York’s finest. The cops hustle the group into the back of the car without so much as explaining what they did wrong.
They don’t place anyone in handcuffs or use much force either, prompting one to wonder why the group doesn’t take off running or punch the cops in the face, as Mike Brown is alleged to have done. A few guys even run towards the car from somewhere out of the frame and seemingly hop in the back seat of their own volition.
Of course, this is just a silly music video, and sadly, rappers would have plenty more opportunities to demonstrate just how bad police brutality can be.
Ice-T
Ice-T took on cops and free speech with his rock group Body Count
There’s some truth to the assertion, in LL Cool J’s song “To da Break of Dawn,” that Ice-T was once a downtown car thief. In his book Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption—from South Central to Hollywood, Ice breaks down how he spent the early 80s stealing a lot more than just cars.
How ironic is it that, 20+ years after the fact, they both play lovable middle-aged cops on TV: Ice-T on NBC’s Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and LL on CBS’ NCIS: Los Angeles.
In 1986, Ice-T was still about that life. The song “6 ‘n the Morning” is a first-person narrative in which he barely escapes from the cops at his front door, having to climb out of a back window. He didn’t even get a chance to grab his old school tape! On the run from Johnny Law, he of course proceeds to commit even more crime.
“6 ‘n the Morning” was one of the first examples of what came to be known as gangster rap. In interviews, Ice has explained that “6 ‘n the Morning” is simply a more-explicit knockoff version of the relatively cryptic “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” by Schoolly D. The song “Boyz-n-the-Hood” by Eazy-E, in turn, is an even more explicit knockoff version of “6 ‘n the Morning.”
A few years later, Ice-T became a pioneer of both rap rock and rappers being targeted by the police, with the song “Cop Killer” by his rock group Body Count.
An eerie foreshadowing of the Chris Dorner rampage a few years ago, “Cop Killer” is the story of a black man who got fed up with police brutality and decided to go out and kill cops. Or as Large Professor put it on Main Source’s “Just a Friendly Game of Baseball,” instead of cops shooting us, he went out and shot them.
Sister Souljah made a somewhat similar suggestion in a 1992 interview with the Washington Post. Instead of killing other black people, she said, black people should take a week to kill white people. As an overture to white swing voters, Bill Clinton promptly threw her under a bus, along with Jesse Jackson. This became known as the Sister Souljah Moment.
Similarly, both George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle addressed the “Cop Killer” controversy during the ‘92 election. Bush appeared to be even more upset than he was when Saddam Hussein tried to have him assassinated. Law enforcement groups across the country threatened to boycott Time Warner, and Time Warner shareholders threatened to dump their stock.
To hear Ice-T tell it, he decided of his own volition to have the Body Count album pulled from stores, at that point, and replaced with a version without “Cop Killer.” Later, Ice was dropped from Warner Bros. Records in a dispute over the cover of his next album, Home Invasion.
After what Time Warner went through with “Cop Killer,” they weren’t about to let Ice-T put them at any more risk—even if it meant contradicting lofty statements they’d made about the importance of free speech. Could this be why some of the most prominent major label rappers have been so quiet these past few weeks?
Slick Rick
Slick Rick brandishes abundant gold jewelry and two real pistols, photo by Janette Beckman
Perhaps the quintessential Slick Rick song, and one of the all-time great rap songs period, “Children’s Story” is a sort of sendup of the first-person crime narratives pioneered by Schoolly D and Ice-T. It takes the form of a bedtime story Rick tells to his nieces, played in the video by a couple of grown-ass women in door knocker earrings, and also a white midget: A little boy, misled by another little boy, start robbing people, and before long they’re on the run from the police.
Needless to say, it doesn’t end well.
As is the case with many of these songs, the lyrics aren’t as amusing as they once seemed, in light of current events.
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“Sirens sounded, he seemed astounded
Before long the lil’ boy got surrounded
He dropped the gun, so went the glory
And this is the way I have to end this story
He was only seventeen, in a madman’s dream
The cops shot the kid, I still hear him scream…”
Ironically, Slick Rick himself later ended up on the run from the police, after an incident in which he shot both his cousin, who’d threatened to kill him, and an innocent bystander, then fled the scene in a car, eventually crashing into a tree and breaking both of his pregnant girlfriend’s legs.
He was arrested and ended up spending the better half of the 1990s behind bars. It could have been worse though. The cops could have killed him when they finally caught up with him. They almost certainly would have gotten away with it. He had a gun.
N.W.A
While the song’s lyrics decry police brutality against young black men, legend has it that the impetus for N.W.A’s “f*ck tha Police” was an incident in which members of the group were detained by the LAPD for shooting at random people with a paintball gun, for sh*ts and giggles.
The cops forced them to lie face down in the street and pointed guns at them, but like Slick Rick, they’re lucky they didn’t get executed right there on the spot. They had a paintball gun, which is perfectly legal, provided you’re not using it to shoot at random people at bus stops, but how were the cops supposed to know?
Two of the so-far-less-publicized police killings of more-or-less-unarmed black men involved guys with guns that weren’t really guns. A guy named John Crawford, probably my long-lost cousin, was shot for walking through Walmart with an air rifle he’d pulled from a shelf, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for playing with a pellet gun in a park.
The FBI eventually caught wind of “f*ck tha Police,” and needless to say, they were none too pleased. They fired off an angry letter to N.W.A’s label, Ruthless Records, which Ruthless then used to generate publicity for the album. Straight Outta Compton went on to sell over two million copies, with little or no airplay for its singles.
The album’s content was at least somewhat vindicated a few years later, when video emerged of the LAPD beating the brakes off of black motorist Rodney King. The cops eventually got away with it, causing the city to erupt in rioting that made what just happened in Ferguson look like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting. Artists like N.W.A were then greeted by a once-skeptical media like the black Psychic Friends Network.
Public Enemy
Flavor Flav called 911 a joke, but later found himself on the wrong side of the law
If you live in a sketchy area and you have a medical emergency, your best bet is to either try to drive yourself to the hospital, or drink some Robitussin and hope for the best. There’s no point in trying to call an ambulance.
In the early 90s, when Public Enemy’s “911 Is a Joke” was released, the media was filled with stories about how long it took for ambulances to arrive in poor black neighborhoods. An old man would have a heart attack, and by the time paramedics arrived, two hours later, he’d be dead as MFN doornails.
While the song’s lyrics specifically refer to the response time for ambulances, they’ve since become just as true for the police in some places. In hard up cities like Camden, NJ, police are being replaced by high-tech surveillance equipment, including microphones that can detect the trajectory of bullets.
It was announced a while back that cops in Kansas City, MO, will no longer respond to domestic violence calls. This is something Flavor Flav might want to consider, having been arrested for domestic violence on multiple occasions. He once owned a fried chicken restaurant in Iowa, which is the next state over. He’s familiar with the area, is what I’m saying.
“911 Is a Joke” appears on Public Enemy’s third album, Fear of a Black Planet. That album’s lead single was “Fight the Power,” which also appears in the film Do the Right Thing. It would be almost too “on the nose,” as they say in Hollywood, to point out the similarities between Do the Right Thing and what happened to Eric Garner, but f*ck it. I’m on the clock.
The NYPD choked out Eric Garner the same way they choked out Radio Raheem. Whereas Radio Raheem was guilty of refusing to turn down “Fight the Power” on his ghetto blaster, which led to a fight in a pizzeria, Eric Garner was accused of selling untaxed cigarettes. Video of Eric Garner’s death was spliced together with Do the Right Thing to create a “remix” that was later posted to director Spike Lee’s Instagram.
The film itself was “ripped from the headlines,” as they say. Radio Raheem was based on a guy named Michael Stewart, a graffiti writer who died after being choked out by NYPD. The cops involved were indicted, then the indictment was thrown out on some ol’ bullsh*t. Then they were indicted again and eventually acquitted by an all-white jury. Plus ça change.
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