{"id":11362,"date":"2019-04-03T16:52:06","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T16:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/?p=11362"},"modified":"2026-05-07T16:05:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T21:05:18","slug":"winnipeg-state-of-mind-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2019\/04\/03\/winnipeg-state-of-mind-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Winnipeg State of Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Nigel Webber <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMy journalistic range is a catalyst for change\u201d – Black Thought <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music is meant to inspire. The right music and lyrics can deliver a message powerfully in a few minutes. In hip-hop, vocals are the focus, giving rappers an unique opportunity to speak their minds in their songs. Rappers have seized the opportunity. Their lyrics can often be a front line perspective of harsher elements of society. In popular music, lyrics become more vapid and have less meaning. Through the years there have been songs with a wider audience appeal that have had such a powerful message that they are still remembered. Music can be a snapshot, a brief look at the zeitgeist and a window into understanding that era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

2019 will mark the 40th year of hip-hop and rap music as a recorded form of music. \u201cRapper\u2019s Delight,\u201d rap\u2019s first hit in 1979, starts with gibberish lyrics and for the next few years, rap was dance music for the club. That all changed in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released \u201cThe Message.\u201d The song is mostly the work of rapper Grandmaster Melle Mel, who tells the story of a poverty stricken neighbourhood. The character Melle Mel creates is witness to the crime, drugs and lack of opportunity in the inner city neighbourhood he lives in. The song has several classic lines but the chilling chorus, delivered in a stop-start manner, \u201cDon\u2019t push me cause I\u2019m close to the edge\/ I\u2019m trying not to lose my head,\u201d are among the most famous lyrics in the genre. After this song came out, President Ronald Reagan visited the South Bronx and said it looked worse than London after World War II. Reagan\u2019s policies, of course, help exacerbate a bad situation into a much worse one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coming out of such an environment it is no surprise that the character in \u201cThe Message\u201d is \u201cclose to the edge.\u201d Conscious rap had its heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s. KRS-One led the \u201cStop the Violence\u201d movement that put out the influential posse track \u201cSelf Destruction\u201d about violence in the black community. The West Coast All Stars gave a California flavour to the same topic in \u201cWe\u2019re All in the Same Gang.\u201d Originally from the East Coast but living in the Bay Area, Tupac Shakur was able to bridge the gap with \u201cKeep Ya Head Up.\u201d Released in 1993 before Tupac had become a super star, \u201cKeep Ya Head Up\u201d is dedicated to Latasha Harlins, a fifteen year old who was shot and killed in 1991 for allegedly trying to steal a bottle of juice. Tupac turns the tragedy into an ode for black women everywhere, acknowledging the oft-forgotten community with lines like, \u201cTupac cares if don\u2019t nobody else care.\u201d The Five Stairsteps\u2019 sample in the chorus allows the song a hopefulness in the lines \u201cooh child, things are going to get easier.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lyrics that do the most to convey Pac\u2019s message are the last half of the first verse. Tupac\u2019s mother Afeni Shakur, a former member of the Black Panthers, struggled with drug addiction and Tupac\u2019s lyrics declare the significance of women in his life and in the world. Across several lines Pac poses multiple questions, \u201cI wonder why we take from our women\/ why we rape our women\/ do we hate our women?\u201d The halting delivery Tupac uses in this section, pausing before each instance of the word \u2018Women\u2019, drives home the importance of women for Pac while bringing back memories of Melle Mel\u2019s delivery in \u201cThe Message\u201d. After asking those questions rhetorically, Pac answers them in turn. He makes it clear that \u201cit\u2019s time to kill for our women\/ time to heal our women\/ be real to our women.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pac finishes his first verse in \u201cKeep Ya Head Up\u201d with a shift to men, telling them they have no right to dictate to women when they can have children, \u201csince a man can\u2019t make one\/ he has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one.\u201d The prescience of this line is profound considering the the restrictions on women\u2019s reproductive health in recent year in the United States. In a plea to his fellow men, Pac cajoles them, \u201cso will the real men get up?\u201d The song came near the end of the conscious era and Pac would become one of the faces of the new era of gangster rap during the mid to late 1990s. Famously Tupac Shakur would be shot and killed in 1996, a case that has never been solved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In last 25 years there has been an inexorable hip-hopification of popular music, culminating in the genre\u2019s ascendance to mass conscious. This has fortified the strata between mainstream and underground rap. While songs like \u201cThe Message\u201d and \u201cKeep Ya Head Up\u201d were popular and game changing within hip-hop, their respective release dates did not allow them the opportunity to reach a mainstream audience. In 2017, a Grammy nominee for Song of the Year changed hip-hop message songs forever by bringing it to the world. In \u201c1-800-273-8255,\u201d Logic wrote an incredibly powerful song about suicide and mental health struggles. The title of the song is the actual number for the American National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The centre had a spike in calls as Logic took the song mainstream, even performing on \u201cEllen\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The verses form a conversation between a caller to the hotline, who is initially suicidal, and the hotline worker who is able to convince the caller to choose life. Logic has been very open about his own struggles with anxiety and depression in his music and in interviews. \u201c1-800\u201d is a vulnerable song, it shows sensitivity, an emotion that is often shunned in rap music in exchange for the hardened street persona. Logic is a pioneer in this respect and more than any other mainstream artist today, he is able to bare his soul in an honest and passionate way. A song like \u201c1-800\u201d doesn\u2019t come around very often and there is no track in recent memory that is comparable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reach of a particular song or artist can affect whether it becomes an inspirational song for the masses. The spark for this article came from the highly inspirational songs, \u201cClear Blue Skies\u201d by Juggaknots and \u201cRenee\u201d by Lost Boyz. Both tracks are undeniable classics in underground \u201890s hip-hop but they fail to reach the general level of awareness of classics like \u201cThe Message\u201d and \u201cKeep Ya Head Up\u201d. Today, in hip-hop, there are lesser known artists like Big KRIT and Mozzy who consistently put out powerful and inspiring music. The recent shift means popular hip- hop equals popular music, making it is less likely that such powerful messages will filter into the mainstream. Logic\u2019s success with \u201c1-800-273-8255\u201d should help to counter that argument but it is currently the exception to the rule.
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by Nigel Webber \u201cMy journalistic range is a catalyst for change\u201d – Black Thought Music is meant to inspire. The right music and lyrics can deliver a message powerfully in a few minutes. In hip-hop, vocals are the focus, giving rappers an unique opportunity to speak their minds in their songs. Rappers have seized the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11364,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11362\/revisions\/11364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}