There’s a line in New York rapper ASAP Ferg’s syrupy new track “Talk It,” a musical response to the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent riots in Ferguson, Mo., that underscored the calcified nature of relations between black communities and the police across America in 2014.
The verse, dotted with cusses, is the last track on his new mixtape, “Ferg Forever.” Ferg recalls nights riding with his uncle, “NWA blastin’, we screamin’, ‘… tha Police,'” he raps, referring to the harsh gangsta rap anthem released by the Compton group in 1989. That song, issued amid gang violence in the years before anger exploded during the 1992 Los Angeles riots over four police officers’ acquittal in the Rodney King beating, is an incendiary artifact — and stills serves as crucial evidence two decades later. “Cause they don’t give two … about me,” continues Ferg. “I mean when I say Ferguson they talk about me.”
Ferg was only 2 months old when NWA’s barbed oath was released, but his and other rappers’ response to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., at the hands of police underscored that hip hop in 2014 remained true to its birthright as a political art form. Dozens of tracks popped up in the weeks after their deaths, each a snapshot op-ed from voices whose medium brought into the present a long history of quick-react musical protests. If marquee names such as Kanye West, Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Nicki Minaj declined to issue musical responses — and Jay Z employed another asset by financing the “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts that NBA players have been wearing during warmups — the underground was rife.
With YouTube and Soundcloud offering immediate distribution — and commercial radio ignoring them in favor of depoliticized music — the songs paid witness. Using a laptop and headphones to build beats, rappers and producers ripped the system like folk singers and funk bands did during the civil rights movement decades earlier. The best were nuanced reactions that took on the cops and the looters or contained an urgency that echoed the politicized work of the Last Poets and Gil Scot Heron, of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message,” Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and collected work of Rage Against the Machine.