On Friday, just days after the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo., J. Cole’s somber protest song“Be Free” spread around the world in a matter of hours, fueled by social media and the hip-hop world’s intense online discourse about Mr. Brown, an 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer last Saturday.
Mr. Cole, a 29-year-old rapper from North Carolina, posted the song early Friday to the online audio platform SoundCloud, which lets users upload tracks and easily share them through social media. By late afternoon it had been listened to more than 250,000 times and, with feelings still raw over the situation in Ferguson, it began to quickly ricochet around the Internet.
“All we want to do is take the chains off,” Mr. Cole sings in the track, his voice breaking over mournful keyboards. “All we want to do is be free.” J. Cole’s “Be Free” was released, publicized and commented on with remarkable speed; according to Billboard, it had become the most talked-about track on Twitter by 10 a.m. Friday, a little more than six hours after it was released. Ann Powers, NPR’s music critic, called it“the first fully formed protest song I’ve heard addressing the death of Mike Brown” and said it was “evocative of Nina Simone.”
My opinion
J.Cole video is living proof that RnB/hip hop music can be used in a positive way to educate and show awareness of what is going on in today's society, and people will sit and listen because the song is gripping and intense, its subtle piano underneath him singing gives a light tone to the track but the words is what makes the song very powerful. Even though one of my main roles is to research "black music" and the the stereotype that it is all very violent and encourages crime in fact in every political song their is a message it is only in some certain songs we can hear an aggressive beat or violent language steamed by anger because of the struggle they may have gone through. In our piece we will be playing "fuc* the police" in the background as it will contradict what the actors will be saying about the music and how "our" music is bad and how we shouldn't promote violence etc but yet we are plain and simple hypocrites by playing the music and eating the stereotypical food such as chicken.
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