TUPAC – A Nigga with Conscience
I have been listening to JASMINE MANS’ spoken word album “The Black Boy Gold” which I got courtesy my favourite spoken word act Dzyadzorm (@dzyadorm). I’ve been listening to one track ‘Let It Be’ more than any other track on the album.
It features a voice clip of legendary hip hop act, TUPAC SHAKUR. On the album’s introductory piece, Tupac is heard speaking about life in the ‘hood’ and why his raps are filled with anger and themes that reflect the struggles in housing projects and tenements within black society, and why artists (rappers) like himself must continue the fight to dismantle the system that continuously keep the black ghetto in a state of poverty, lawlessness and strife.
Below is a transcribed text of the introduction on The Black Boy Gold album.
Enjoy and share your thoughts.
‘’IF I KNOW, in this hotel room, they have food everyday and I knock on the door everyday to eat and they open and let me see the party; let me see, we like they throwing food around and yet tell me there’s no food in there.
Every day, I’m standing outside trying to sing my way in: ‘We are hungry, please let us in’. After about a week, the same song gon’ change to ‘We hungry. We need food’.
After about 2 to 3 weeks it’s like ‘Give us some food, we knocking at the door’. After a year it’s like ‘I’m picking up the lock, coming thru the door blasting’. Is like when you hungry and you reach this level, we don’t want it anymore.
We asked for it 10 years ago. We was asking with the (Black) Panthers. We was asking with the Civil Rights Movement. We was asking. Now, those people that was asking are now dead or in jail. What do you think we gonna do?? And we shouldn’t be angry?
In my raps, I’m rapping to my community shouldn’t be filled with rage. The same atrocities they gave to me. The media isn’t talking about it so in my raps I need to talk about it. And it seems foreign because no one is talking about it. Is like being the last person alive. After 3 days, you can’t do it again.
What can I do? where can I go? All my life I’ve grown around black people and poor people. But I can’t live around black people now because they will rob me. And why will they rob me? Because they are starving cos there’s no money here. All the society is doing is leeching of the ghetto. They use the ghetto for their pain, for their sorrow, for their culture, for their music, for their happiness, their movies to talk about boys in the hood.
I’m not saying I’m going to rule the world or I’m gonna change the world but I guarantee I’ll spark the brain that would change the world. And that’s our job to spark somebody else watching us. We might not be the ones but let’s not be selfish and because we aren’t going to change the world so let us not talk about how we gon’ change it. I don’t know how to change it but if I talk about how dirty it is down here, I know someone gonna clean it up.
___ TUPAC SHAKUR
