Viscerally Facing Up to Ferguson Killer Mike and J. Cole Bare Their Emotions at a Pivotal Time nytimes/2014/12/07/arts/killer-mike-and-j-cole-bare-their-emotions-at-a-pivotal-time.html By JON CARAMANICADEC. 3, 2014 Photo Killer Mike addressing the crowd at the Ready Room in St. Louis shortly after a grand jury decision not to indict a police officer in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. CreditMicah Usher for the Riverfront Times There are few arguments more tiresome than the one over hip-hop’s political potential. It begins something like this: Hip-hop’s turn away from the socially conscious dates back to the early to mid-1990s, right around the time when Soundscan showed that hip-hop was truly integral to this country’s pop music. Over time, as hip-hop became flush with success, the agitating in the form of sloganeering and the implicit politics of gangster rap that were once the norm became scarcer and scarcer. That’s meant two decades of arguing between people who think hip-hop is a wasted political force and those who think it has no such obligations. There is no right side to this debate. Broad generalizations about the music’s squandered transformative potential overlook the value of hip-hop’s sure creep into every corner of American culture, though hip-hop’s victories do tend to blunt its more incendiary impulses. The genre doesn’t do the heavy lifting it once did, and may not be equipped for it anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s a neutral force. Photo J. Cole talks to a reporter from Complex about the shooting on a trip to Ferguson. And any commercial and cultural power as large as hip-hop is guaranteed to have a host of dissenters, even from within, and it’s in that gray area that Killer Mike and J. Cole reside. These are rappers who have been adjacent to mega-fame but never achieved it themselves; artists who have long been ambivalent about making music that hews to the norms of mainstream hip-hop but don’t fancy themselves total outsiders; concerned citizens who see advocacy as a part of their jobs, even if those around them aren’t much bothered with it. And it is these two men who, when confronted with events in Ferguson, Mo., made the loudest noise — not by making music, but by laying bare their innermost struggles. For Mr. Cole, it was in the form of an interviewsoon after Michael Brown’s death; for Killer Mike, it was an onstage speechthe night a grand jury declined to indict Mr. Brown’s killer, the police officer Darren Wilson. In a year when racial issues roiled the country and popular music largely kept its eyes averted, these were brutal, vital, meaningful moments, unvarnished snatches of raw feeling. Yes, there were songs that grappled with the events in Ferguson — Mr. Cole made one, the anguished “Be Free” — but in the online clutter, songs can be easy to ignore. These off-script moments broke through, though, collapsing the wall of performed character and starting the sort of conversation once thought to be solely the purview of pop agitators. Continue reading the main story Given that so much of the narrative around the events in Ferguson coalesced online — via live streams and videos and photos on Vine and Instagram, all amplified by Twitter and Facebook — it’s natural that the most striking pop music encounters functioned in the same way. On Aug. 17, eight days after Mr. Brown was killed, the city of Ferguson was bristling with anger, hurt and protests, and Mr. Cole got on a plane with some friends to see it all for himself. Continue reading the main story “We ain’t come down here to do no interviews,” he told a reporter from Complex who had buttonholed him for a quick conversation, captured on video. “We came down here to feel it, ’cause this is history.” What followed were five minutes of uncommonly raw, forthright conversation. Asked about his initial response to Mr. Brown’s death, he said that he had reacted much as he had to other recent killings of young black men: with resigned frustration. But then he turned the gaze on himself: “I’m ashamed that I had that reaction, ’cause we always have that reaction, for years, that’s how we be feeling.” Photo Demonstrators at a memorial site for Michael Brown at an apartment complex in Ferguson, Mo. CreditMichael B. Thomas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The word “ashamed” was the real rupture here. When Mr. Cole said it, his eyes softened, and his brow furrowed just a bit. He went on to describe the cracking of his own complacency. “I didn’t even watch that Staten Island video, ’cause I ain’t want to see it no more,” he said, referring to a clip in which Eric Garner struggles in a police chokehold in July. (He died shortly afterward.) “I don’t want to see a dude, I don’t want to see another black man get killed.” “I saw the Oscar Grant video when it dropped on YouTube, when he gets killed,” he added, referring to a police shooting in Oakland, Calif., in 2009. “I don’t want to watch that, so we run from it, ’cause it hurts.” But things changed: Mr. Cole did watch the Garner video, did watch the Ferguson live streams, did read articles about the events there. In the interview, he showed himself to be a ravenous consumer of media: in other words, an ordinary person with an outsize platform. Often didactic in his music, he showed himself to be a willing student, too, a listener hoping to soak up things from his surroundings. “When you out here, you feel the humbleness,” he said in Ferguson. “You talk when it’s time to talk. Really, you come out here and listen to what your people have to say. I been out here all day like this.” Then he stood there silently, arms folded, taking it in. Mr. Cole’s trip wasn’t remarkable in and of itself. Plenty of people, moved by the community’s frustration, went to Ferguson to observe or lend a hand. Other hip-hop stars went, too. But Mr. Cole’s description of the pain that had long led him (and countless others) to avert their eyes from tragedy of this scale was a loud, bracing moment of pure honesty. Months later, it found a counterpart. On Nov. 24, the day a grand jury declined to indict Mr. Wilson on any charges connected to Mr. Brown’s death, Killer Mike performed at the Ready Room in St. Louis as part of a tour with Run the Jewels, his duo with El-P. Shortly before the show, the grand jury decision had been released, and he took the stage shaken, a moment captured in a fan video that has since been viewed more than 350,000 times. He explained that he and El-P usually came onstage to Queen’s “Champion,” but that it didn’t feel right given what had happened that day. “I knew it was coming,” he said, referring to the decision, his voice tightening and getting higher. Moments later, he broke down: “I have a 20-year-old son, I have a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them.” Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story There were tears in his voice, the tears of a father who fears he won’t be able to protect his children no matter how hard he tries. “I stood in front of my wife, and I hugged her,” he said, “and I cried like a baby.” What’s striking in the video is how Killer Mike funnels sadness into action. He’s devastated but motivated, just as Mr. Cole was. Together, their words recall the moment when Kanye West, speaking at a nationally televised benefit for Hurricane Katrina victims, said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” That was in 2005, back when Mr. West wasn’t the hip-hop lodestone he is now. (So far, Mr. West has been silent about Ferguson.) Like Mr. Cole and Killer Mike today, he was somewhere between vulnerable citizen and established celebrity. Maybe that’s the sweet spot for modern hip-hop outrage: when you’re successful enough to have a voice, but not so successful that you don’t remember what it was like to have no voice, when you feel you can topple authority without toppling all that you’ve built for yourself in the process.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 08:52:34 +0000
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