My fifteen-year-old son has been radicalized by Spotify.
Hopping into the car the other night for a ride home from a friend’s house, he turned to me with a grin and said, “Did you know Spotify made a Black Lives Matter playlist and put a song called ‘Fuck Donald Trump’ on it?”
No, I had to confess, I didn’t know that.
He quickly cued it up for me, and there it came, blasting through the factory model speakers in our minivan.
Police have become more militarized and more afraid of the communities they are supposed to protect.
The song—a 2016 protest anthem known officially as “FDT”—seemed humorous to him, as garish, perhaps, as Trump himself. Or maybe he was embarrassed to be riding along the streets of Minneapolis with his mom at night, with a YG and Nipsey Hussle song blaring.
Either way, he switched it off after a moment or two, and instead put on a song called “Bigger Picture” by Atlanta rapper Lil Baby.
“Do you like this one, mom?” he asked with a smile, his six-foot-one-and-growing frame folded into the seat beside me.
“Bigger Picture” starts with a newscaster’s voice, somewhat hidden behind lilting piano music, describing the scene in Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white police officer.
Sarah Lahm
“Protests continue amid a growing national outcry over the death of George Floyd,” the newscaster states, leading into Lil Baby’s emotion-filled expression of what it is like to have to witness yet another Black person be killed in police custody.
His words are released in a steady torrent, seemingly more full of pain than anger. In “Bigger Picture,” Lil Baby makes the current uprising over police violence both personal and mournful.
They killing us for no reason / Been goin’ on for too long to get even, he laments.
And this song was written and released just days before Rayshard Brooks was shot in the back by a white Atlanta police officer for resisting arrest in a Wendy’s parking lot.
As we listened to “Bigger Picture” together, my son scanned my face for a clue to my reaction, probably without realizing it. “See?” he says, “God is the only man that I fear,” he repeats from the song, perhaps believing I need to think of Lil Baby as virtuous somehow.
I don’t.
As we continued our drive home, past convenience store and restaurant windows still boarded up three weeks after Floyd’s murder, my son put on an old song by Tupac before sliding into “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy.
It was my turn to smile.
“Fight the Power” is the song of my teenage days, the one my friends and I played on repeat (it was a CD then, not a Spotify playlist) as we woke up to the reality of racial injustice as well as police and mob-fueled violence, including the murder of sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins in New York.
“1989 the number another summer,” Public Enemy’s frontman Chuck D sings as “Fight the Power” kicks off.
And here we are in 2020. Another summer, another swath of terrible violence at our doorstep. Minneapolis is my hometown and the place I chose to raise my kids.
Sarah Lahm
When I was younger, it was called “Murderapolis” for a time, thanks to a spike in gun violence that included the 1992 killing of Minneapolis police officer Jerry Hoff. He was shot in the back while sitting at a pizza restaurant—a crime that seemed shocking then, because who has the gall to kill a uniformed cop?
News reports from the time say gang members shot Hoff as part of an ongoing feud with police.
President Bill Clinton came to Minneapolis in 1994, two years after Hoff’s murder, to speak at a gathering of the National Association of Police Organizations. At the time, Clinton was deep in the throes of trying to get his administration’s federal crime bill passed, and he used Hoff’s slaying as an emotional touchpoint.
“The people of Minneapolis know that taking the easy way out is no longer an option,” Clinton told the crowd of police and politicians gathered around him. Hoff was a hero, gunned down by a lawless gang member, leaving his wife and family behind to grieve, Clinton stated.
Just think, he mused, if there had already been an additional 100,000 police on the streets, as the federal crime bill promised to deliver. Imagine the decisiveness of a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy that will lock the bad guys away for good, with more money than ever available for prisons.
Many people now see how wrong this was, and how much damage the 1994 crime bill has caused. Mass incarceration rates have swelled, locking up poor people and people of color for years over minor infractions.
Police have become more militarized and more afraid of the communities they are supposed to protect.
But from whom? From what? The chilling murder of George Floyd, who was allegedly resisting arrest over the alleged use of a fake $20 bill, shows us in vivid detail how unjust our system of policing is, and perhaps always was.
Sarah Lahm
Lil Baby, in “Bigger Picture,” says it much better than I can:
I see blue lights, I get scared and start runnin’
That shit be crazy, they ‘posed to protect us
Throw us in handcuffs and arrest us/While they go home at night
That shit messed up
Knowing we need help, they neglect us
Wondering who gon’ make them respect us
It’s a protest song for today, and one that is both nothing and everything like the ones I knew as a teenager.