Not just a backing track — the sound of protest
In the wake of the brutal murder of an African American man, George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, a number of hip hop artists spoke of their outrage and added to the momentum of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests across America and the world. Duvall and Heckemeyer (2018) believe that support from this community further defined the BLM movement, and legitimised the collective action in the Black Lives Matter protests. A number of prominent hip hop artists released music and videos portraying the experiences of being a Black person in America, however this is not a new phenom with scholar West-White (2020) noting that “The fight for civil rights and music have been a formidable duo since slaves hid coded messages in sermonic homilies and lyrical hymns.”
This article from the ABC traces the beginning of protest music from 1982 through to 2020, I will look closer at NWA’s protest song Fuck the police from 1988 which featured lyrics such as “police think they have the authority to kill a minority” and its ramifications on the hip hop group. This song was NWA’s response to their “dehumanizing encounters with police profiling and brutality (Young, 2019. p.24).” During one of the first performances of this song, gunshots went off which caused a riot, it is thought that these gunshots were fireworks planted by the police who went on to arrest the members of NWA when they left the stage to take shelter. The group was told to never perform the song again and would face fines if they did so, however in 1989 fans began chanting the lyrics to Fuck the police to which the group responded by performing the song. Hip hop as a subculture has always been political and used as a powerful form of resistance. Hip hop will continue to be a voice for the those fighting for civil rights with rapper Royce da 59 saying to ABC (2020) “Hip-hop is gonna continue that movement and it’s never gonna stop because that’s what we are, that’s what we stand for.”
