Lauryn Hill: "Black Rage (Sketch)"

To mainstream America, Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of an unarmed teenager in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, has been overtaken by the clumsy show of strength that followed, where armored carriers and tear gas canisters pressed their militarized bootprint on the public psyche. The resultant press coverage resembled Civil Rights battles of the 1960s. The traumatizing video of police gunning down Kajiemi Powell in nearby St. Louis after he stole two bottles of soda followed suit, as if to prove the unrest had done little to upset the status quo. In raising mainstream concerns about the militarization of local police, all the riot squads have proven is that Ferguson law enforcement is terrible at public relations. After all, they didn’t need tanks and tear gas to kill an unarmed teenager; they just needed a gun.

What is culture’s role in times like these? This debate has played out on a secondary level online, while protesters focused on justice for Michael Brown. Some have been critical of rap music’s role, in spite of the genre’s long history of implicit and explicit law enforcement critique. Still, concern over the silence of the genre’s biggest names resonates. In its rawest, most populist form, hip-hop still provides a space for artists to exorcise demons, both personal and political, in earnest. But in some corners, such direct artistic expressionism is seen as passé, a relic of a time when rap was embarrassingly sincere, lacking in bourgeois self-awareness.

Of course, artists addressing real-world events through music risk trivializing fraught subjects, or appearing opportunistic. Art that tackles a contentious, real-world event is hamstrung, too, by the existing pathos of a reality with which it can’t possibly compete: the photo of an unarmed man in a t-shirt, hands in the air, confronted by several armed soldiers in combat gear; Michael Brown’s mother, tearful, on CNN; the shaky videos capturing the adrenaline of a crowd in the face of spiraling tear gas canisters; the long stemmed roses that line the median where Michael Brown was murdered.

Ferguson, as a tragic manifestation of a much wider American problem, also risks becoming denuded and detached from its context daily, reinforcing the deeply American tendency to treat racism like a game of Whack-A-Mole—if we could just handle Ferguson, everything else will sort itself out. Lauryn Hill‘s “Black Rage (Sketch)”, recorded live in her living room, averts these pitfalls in part because it wasn’t written with Missouri in mind (she’s been performing it live since at least 2012).

“Black Rage” takes its melody from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things,” a song that originally appeared in The Sound of Music but has since acquired subversive connotations within black music. (Coltrane, though not an activist, was an aesthetic radical.) But despite its relatively tame lyrics, even the original version of “My Favorite Things” has a dark undercurrent; the brown paper packages tied up with strings were Maria Rainer’s method of coping with fear.

“Black Rage” is a key record for this moment because it recognizes our problems are deeply entrenched, and that postmodern detachment or cynical capitalism are poorly formed tools for people hoping to make a sustained attack on widespread systemic violence. Lauryn Hill celebrates black rage not as a raw expression of pain, nor as an irrational behavior that must be reigned in. Like Maria Rainer, it’s a coping mechanism, but for Lauryn Hill, it’s also something more: a practical strategy.

On a surface level, Lauryn Hill’s version explains to outsiders the source of black community angst. But its purpose is not public relations. After all, the armored troop carriers have already stopped rolling through Ferguson, and CNN no longer offers round-the-clock coverage; if white America looks the other way, the movement will continue. Instead, the record is a defiant reclamation of black rage, one that does not ask for tolerance of this rage, but suggests it plays a primary, essential role in maintaining constant pressure on the system. That law enforcement murdering black people can be casually shrugged off as accidental, the-way-things-are, marginalizing sensible human beings as “mad for complaining,” is to reinforce fear. To combat that fear, Lauryn Hill has reoriented the conversation around a quality that had fallen out of favor, derided as counterproductive or unfashionable: black rage. Cooler heads will not prevail.

So when the dogs bite
When the beatings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don’t fear so bad!

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