Why haven't you learned anything?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Hip-Hop & Rap
Tigereyes — 6 months ago(September 04, 2025 07:29 AM)
Why haven't you learned anything?
Man that school **** is a joke
The same people who control the school system control
The prison system, and the whole social system
Ever since slavery,
Knowhatimsayin'? Cuz see the schools ain't teachin' us nuthin'
They ain't teachin' us nuthin' but how to be slaves and hardworkers
For white people to build up they ****
Make they businesses successful while it's exploitin' us
Knowhatimsayin'? And they ain't teachin' us nuthin' related to
Solvin' our own problems, knowhatimsayin'?
Ain't teachin' us how to get crack out the ghetto
They ain't teachin' us how to stop the police from murdering us
And brutalizing us, they ain't teachin' us how to get our rent paid
Knowhatimsayin'? They ain't teachin' our families how to interact
Better with each other, knowhatimsayin'? They just teachin' us
How to build they **** up, knowhatimsayin'? That's why my niggas
Got a problem with this ****, that's why niggas be droppin' out that
Shit cuz it don't relate, you go to school the ****in' police
Searchin' you you walkin' in your **** like this a military compound
Knowhatimsayin'? So school don't even relate to us
Until we have some **** where we control the ****in' school system
Where we reflect how we gon solve our own problems
Them niggas ain't gon relate to school, **** that just how it is
Knowhatimsayin'? And I love education, knowhatimsayin'?
But if education ain't elevatin' me, then you knowhatimsayin' it ain't
Takin' me where I need to go on some bullshit, then **** education
Knowhatimsayin'? At least they ****, matter of fact my nigga
This whole school system can suck my dick, BEEYOTCH!! -
Tigereyes — 6 months ago(September 04, 2025 07:40 AM)
"You have the emergence in human society of this thing that's called the State.
What is the State? The State is this organized bureaucracy: it is the police department. It is the Army, the Navy. It is the prison system, the courts, and what have you. This is the State; it is a repressive organization.
But the state and gee well, you know, you've got to have the police because if there were no police, look at what you'd be doing to yourselves – you'd be killing each other if there were no police! But the reality is the police become necessary in human society only at that juncture in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain't got"
The average Black male
Live a third of his life in a jail cell
'Cause the world is controlled by the white male
And the people don't never get justice
And the women don't never get respected
And the problems don't never get solved
And the jobs don' never pay enough
So the rent always be late
Can you relate?
We living in a police state
I throw a Molotov cocktail at the precinct
You know how we think:
Organize the hood under I Ching banners
Red, Black, and Green instead of gang bandanas
FBI spying on us through the radio antennas
And them hidden cameras in the streetlight watching society
With no respect for the people's right to privacy
I want to be free to live, able to have what I need to live
Bring the power back to the street where the people live
We sick of working for crumbs and filling up the prisons
Dying over money and relying on religion
For help. We do for self like ants in a colony
Organize the wealth into a socialist economy
A way of life based off the common need
And all my comrades is ready, we're just spreading the seed
No more bondage, no more political monsters
No more secret space launchers
Government departments started it in the projects
Material objects, thousands up in the closets
Could've been invested in a future for my comrades
Battle contacts, primitive weapons out in combat
Many never come back, pretty niggas be running with gats
Rather get shot in they back than fire back
We tired of that, corporations hiring Blacks
Denying the facts exploiting us all over the map
That's why I write the **** I write in my raps
list=RD -
Tigereyes — 6 months ago(September 04, 2025 08:09 AM)
dead prez’s debut album
Let’s Get Free
, released in 2000, celebrated its 25th anniversary this year.
The MCs of dead prez are Mutulu "M-1" Olugaba and Khnum "stic.man" Ibomu. Just looking at Let's Get Free's album cover alone makes quite a statement about what type of hip-hop group you're in for. Those kids with the rifles are South African freedom fighters and they are celebrating an anti-Apartheid victory. The intro to the album reinforces the tone with a speech from the Uhuru Movement's chairman Omali Yeshitela using an allegory of how Indigenous people in the Arctic hunt wolves to draw parallels to how the US government flooded the hoods across the country with crack and further exacerbated violence and disunity within the community. Let's Get Free is formatted a lot like Ice Cube's Death Certificate, with the first half of the album reflecting the current status that black people are in and the second half laying out a path where black people need to go. The songs on the first half of the album discusses how the American education system lies to its black students and either tries to mold them into good little quiet and complicit capitalist worker bees or introduces them to the prison system instead of enlightening them about how all the structures they see all around them were shaped (my analysis of "'They' Schools" in my old review was way off the mark). From there, the first half of Let's Get Free discusses the overbearing presence of the police within black communities, how the prison-industrial complex profits off of incarcerated black bodies, and the general precarity of black life within this ****ed up white supremacist structure. The first half has a few songs with content that's relatively lighter in comparison. This album's lead single is "Hip-Hop", which bemoans the commercialism of hip-hop. "I'm an African" is a hip-hop version of "I'm Black and I'm Proud" except more incendiary and globally minded, drawing solidarity between American black people and the black people of Africa. The other song is "Mind Sex", which people love to make fun of, which is a damnation of us, not dead prez. How dare dead prez have the gall to make a song where they talk about wanting to build an intellectual and emotional connection to a woman before having sex with her, right? They're not even on some entitled "I'm a nice guy" **** either; they're very transparent about how they want the relationship to develop from the very beginning. Am I supposed to believe that "Mind Sex" is some kind of "simp" **** while the millions of other songs about women that are fueled by insecurity, overcompensating, and more thoughts about other men they're not ****ing than on the woman in question is spittin' real game? I don't mean to throw Biggie of all people under the bus, but listen to "One More Chance (Remix)" again and you can see how weirdly insecure a lot of the lyrics are. As a matter of fact, I get a feeling that the interactions with women he rapped about were fueled by his inability to get over girls dissing him back when he was a kid in school.
The second half of the album has songs that promote much more healthy dietary habits, practicing discipline in doing what needs to be done before the leisure activities, and making sure to appreciate the happier moments in life (beautiful sunny days, quality time with friends, etc.) despite all the hardships. "Psychology" attempts to break black people away from the psychological conditioning black people have been implanted with in order to keep them subjugated. "Animal in Man" is a retelling of George Orwell's Animal Farm and "It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop" is a remix of "Hip-Hop". The two hidden tracks after the 20-something tracks of silence return to the darker sound of the first half, "Propaganda" being pretty self-explanatory and "The Pistol" talking about the paradox of guns in black communities.
Let's Get Free is mostly produced by dead prez themselves with Hedrush, their mentor Lord Jamar, and a young Kanye West producing "It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop". The producers provide a dark and somewhat melancholy soundscape (especially in the first half) with bits of live instrumentation. These beats sound perfect with dead prez' style and lyricism. dead prez has a unique flavor in their beats that I really dig. dead prez didn't make their name as go-to producers for other rappers and I didn't like stic.man's beats on Nas' Untitled at all, but they knew what sound worked for themselves on this album and Revolutionary But Gangsta.
What's the problem here? Well, now I feel some type of way seeing KKKanye's presence here because he went from getting his foot in the door making a beat for two principled hardcore pro-black leftists to becoming the only billionaire so desperate to maintain his spot within Massa's house that he has passed off the same miseducation dead prez talked about on "'They' Schools" and "Propaganda" as unencumbered black intellectual thought and attempted to monetize