GenZine Issue 1: Music & Activism

By James Vaughn Let’s start off with a confession. I don’t know what is and isn’t cultural appropriation. The term just seems like a large gray area. Let us now move to a request. Please stop asking if this or that is cultural appropriation. I don’t know. Where is the line between appreciation and appropriation? I cannot tell you that.

However, I can tell you about things that make me feel weird. Overcooked eggs. Elongated small talk. White people blasting rap music with an overt social justice message. I cannot tell you why, exactly, but I’m going to try to explain it as well as I` can.

Race issues have always interested me since I was young. Maybe it’s unavoidable as a black person, maybe it’s because I can’t let myself feel too happy. I mean, did a week even happen if you didn’t feel hopeless at least once? Just me? Anyway, my parents made sure that I was aware of my black ancestry as began to attend The Collegiate School, a place still striving to be fully welcoming to kids of color. I learned about enslavement and Jim Crow and The Civil Rights Movement and its fallout. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve delved further into race issues in America because I guess enjoy the feeling of Damnit! Again?!

As high school began, I began to try to connect how the racial history of America influenced everyday interactions. I also began to get into music at the same time. I noticed that rap and trap music were really popular among the white kids I went to school with. Songs about things barely relatable to anyone— 2 pints of lean is A LOT of lean— blasted through the halls and on school buses. The songs that raised the most questions for me (“water on my b****, keep her wet like my cellphone.” What the hell is this supposed to mean?) were the songs with the overt social justice message that I mentioned before.

Three songs that really made me think were Meek Mill’s “What’s Free” (ft. Rick Ross and Jay Z), Joey Bada$$’s “Paper Trails,” and Vic Mensa’s “We Could be Free” (ft. Ty Dolla $ign). All of these songs are undeniably about the history and present day context of black struggle in America. Yet, they were being blasted by people would would claim that Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Philando Castille and Freddie Gray and Eric Gardner were all isolated incidents. By people who claim that “obviously black people must be doing something wrong if they go to prison so often” (paraphrased quote). By people who still are unclear on when they can say the n-word (I’ll take “Never” for 500, Alex). Some of the kids blasting the music don’t believe these things, and really do appreciate the struggle even if they never will totally understand it.

My issue is that nobody is playing this for the lyrics, yet each song revolves around the words. Each song has a simple beat and the words are very easy to hear, but it feels to me as though people don’t get the songs. The songs are an attempt to force conversations that have been delayed for decades and centuries. As I explained before, I’m anti-uncomfortable-conversations, but this is an exception. Lives depend on these conversations. But, my many of my classmates listen to these songs like the black struggle is cool with no intent to actually take the lyrics to heart and reflect. In “What’s Free?” Meek Mill explains how, no matter how successful he is as a black man— ask James Blake and Lebron James— he’s still a thug to some people, “Seein’ how I prevailed and now they try to knock me back.” He somehow doesn’t belong where he is.

One thing my classmates could do to take this lyric to heart is to try to make “melanated” kids feel welcome in the school. That means changing traditions older than America. Changing the way the school looks to reflect the way the country looks.