Soul Music Raised Me

Soul Music Raised Me.

The vibe. The lyrics. The artists. The message.

From feeling the depth of Tears of a Clown
to everything about Songs in the Key of Life.
Marvin Gaye showed me What’s Going On
just like The Wailers did in their songs.
Shout out to Joe Higgs. If you know, you know.

Public Enemy brought the man with the biggest voice
and the loudest microphone in hip-hop: Chuck D.
He introduced me to the world through words
the same way John Coltrane and Miles Davis
introduced me to the world through melodies.

I always loved history. Got that from moms.
Always been proud to be Black. Got that from pops.
A pride that never came without a fight:
from static in school to racists on my block,
to digging for the truth about Black history
in a whitewashed world.

Besides my father, Chuck D told me
about Black leaders whose names
would never echo in my school’s halls.
Outside those walls I learned of freedom fighters
who gave their lives for our survival.
Against every imaginable odd,
in spite of a system that only left room in the back
for anything Black.

 

I felt powerful slipping a cassette into my Walkman
and taking soul trips on musical spaceships.
I landed on Fear of a Black Planet.
A vision of Earth, through the prism of white power,
crumbling.

I remember reading the inside jacket,
where Chuck D revealed a worldwide conspiracy
to eradicate Black people.
My mind was blown open,
like a door to a greater reality.
His words ring even truer today. After all
what are slavery, Jim Crow, colonisation,
redlining and mass incarceration
if not the expressions of a system
built on exploiting and oppressing
countries and people of the global south?

School was never touching this.
But Gang Starr’s Guru did.
Ras Kass did.
Songs like Conspiracy and Nature of the Threat
fed me more truth than the depleted,
outdated lies passed off as knowledge in school —
like columbus “discovering”
a land already inhabited.

I ingested these lessons.
Music brought them out of me.
The grooves gave me a place to plant seeds
for others to grow from, just like my people did before me.

That’s what I did in Propaganda.
I talk about the plight of Africans,
from great civilizations turned into slaves,
and about the power of keeping people ignorant
of their own identity, whether by banning Black history,
miseducating the masses,
lying about the past,
or controlling the message
in the music industry.

I believe it’s powerful and necessary to document this.
To leave clues. Keys to a greater reality.
I believe Propaganda carries an important message:
knowledge of self, through liberation education.

Especially now, when freedom of speech
and the teaching of Black history
are slowly being outlawed.

So my suggestion is simple:
check out our song Propaganda.
While it’s still legal to do so.