For those of you that don’t know Joey Bada$$, you should get to know him. He is a fairly new rapper/actor, rapping “Devastated” and performing in the show, Mr. Robot. His newest song, “Land of the Free,” kept reminding me of the same problems that we have been complicating in this class. For instance, in one of his first lines, Joey raps, “Full house on my hands, the card I was dealt/ Three K’s, two A’s in AmeriKKKA.”[1] From the beginning he realizes the actualities of American society: the full hand (the resistance of the United States to accept difference and people), the cards he was dealt (the realities that he has to live with such as oppression and prejudicial justice), and the three K’s in America (the living and breathing racism throughout the American landscape and mindset). “Sometimes I speak and I feel like it ain’t my words.”[2] Joey realizes what so many activists before him have realized and fought. When Mitchell, Walker, and other black activists speak to a city of disenfranchised black folk, they realize that they are talking to a dehumanized population. They realize the effects of mass discrimination and segregationist practices, and thus, they try and give them a voice, a sovereign voice in newspapers, meetings, and sometimes at picnics: places both physical and symbolic where voices could ring free.
Even more, Joey actualizes this body-prejudice dynamic that has been plaguing my own ideas and activism throughout its inception. Hence, he raps, “In the land of the free, it’s for the free loaders/ Leave us dead in the street then be your organ donors/ They disorganized my people, made us all loners/ Still got the last names of our slave owners.”[3] In these few lines, he reifies this physical object of black America and the “problems” held therein. He illustrates the realities of segregationist policies that affect health, the manipulation that was put into action therefore, the name beholden to those black bodies, and the action that is correlated with divisive separationisms in black spheres. Ultimately, this song stood out to me because of its connections with black, historical activism, challenging and discussing the same problems and the same obstacles.
In his last verse, he sings, “All our history hidden, ain’t no liberty given,” realizing this silence in black/African American historical education that ultimately affects the perceptions of our world and the ignorance of activisms and activist activities.[4] Moreover, he pushes the envelope in regards to religion in his final lines, “The lord won’t get you acquitted, but still ask for forgiveness/ Put opiate in syringes then inject his religion/ How many times do I gotta tell you I’m a man on a mission.”[5] In the end, his voice reverberates throughout the history of black activism and this complication with Christianity, this division that fuels and counters activist realities; he finally realizes his religious voice, “I’m a man on a mission”: the first step toward activist credibility and reality, simultaneously questioning and denouncing white Christianity for the truer, more just black God.
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