![]() ![]() When you're black these kinds of tragedies have a way of making everything macro - political crisis, financial crisis, climate crisis - seem manageable, even laughable, in comparison. Terror Management came just two months before 21-year-old rapper Juice WRLD's unexpected death this weekend. Hiding Places dropped in March, the same month Nipsey Hussle was senselessly gunned down. producer Kenny Segal, and Terror Management - feel like bookends to a year of grief. The two albums woods released on his label Backwoodz Studioz this year - Hiding Places, with L.A. Now that everything's so surreal, we're realists again. We were just too high on hope to read the writing on the wall. ![]() Actually, the times have been this wicked for years, too. In the same song he raps, "'Shorty can't eat no book' what I told Ta-Nehesi Coates / The room was thick with smoke." The funny thing is he's been this wicked for years the times just finally caught up with him. "Western education is forbidden / Might as well sell what's left of your Ritalin," he raps on a song whose title ("Western Education is Forbidden") is translated from the name of the Nigerian jihadist organization Boko Haram. ![]() Even his one-liners are succinct tragicomedies. He raps like a ghost and every bar is haunted. The best rapper of 2019 is billy woods, the poet laureate of our Afro dystopia. Meaning, the rest of y'all might want to listen to us, if you plan to make it out of here alive. We're the canaries in the coal mine outfitted with respirators. That feeling of outside forces bringing an end to life as you know it? Yeah, we know all about that. Dystopia is just another way of name-checking the blues if you're black. Hell, we've been living through dystopia in the western world for 400 years: Slavery. We, too, have the right to exist in an end-times fantasy, the same way we have the right to create our own Afro-futurist narratives of optimism. Too many dystopian threads feature a colorless future, where whites are the only survivors running scared and we, presumably, are already dead. A couple of years ago Angelica Jade Bastien wondered aloud in Vulture, "Why Don't Dystopias Know How To Talk About Race?" She was talking about the cinematic and small-screen boom in dystopian narratives and our predictable absence from them. In the winter of our discontent, so much chart-topping pop rap sounded mind-numbingly content.Īs the year went on, I found myself listening to a lot of rap that was hard to listen to - full of sonic dissonance and emotional distance, and pregnant with something rarely present in dystopian tropes: the sounds of blackness. The only thing worse is the unspoken irony. We lost too many voices - to overdoses and unexplainable tragedy - before their prime (Some of them: Lil Peep, Mac Miller, Fredo Santana, Doe B, Bankroll Fresh, XXXTentacion, Nipsey Hussle, Juice WRLD). The 2010s will likely go down as the deadliest era in rap, too. ![]()
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