Tomorrow, the least qualified, most bigoted, and most outwardly racist president in modern American history will be sworn in to office. What happens next? Words, usually my strong suit, fail me. Luckily, we have a rich history of horrible presidents pissing off great rappers (and vice versa) to fall back on in these uncertain times.
Hip hop grew up alongside Reaganism in the '80s, with its first great political track addressing the atrocious state of poor urban communities that were being ignored by the president unless he was policing them. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" moved rap beyond its DJ-focused, party culture beginnings and into the realm of politics and social critiques via the MC. 35 years and many Chuck Ds, KRS-Ones, Ice Cubes, and Mos Defs later, hip hop has become a breeding ground for political thought, a valuable and productive outlet for the rage felt by millions of Americans.
In light of tomorrow's inauguration, we're focusing on the tracks directed at the powers that be, whether that's the military industrial complex, the PMRC, unjust leaders, or capitalist pigs. It's healthy to question authority, and these ten tracks from 1991 to the present day will get you in the mood to do so. Click through the gallery to listen.
Public Enemy - "Can't Truss It" (1991)
Picking just one of Chuck D's many powerful protest songs was tough, but I eventually settled on this one from PE's swan song, Apocalypse '91... The Enemy Strikes Back. "Can't Truss It" explains how slavery evolved into an almost equally oppressive system in the United States, with Chuck calling judges the modern-day slave ship captains and making a witty comparison between record labels exploiting rappers and slaveowners branding blacks: "Three months passed, they brand a label on my ass/To signify I'm owned, I'm on the microphone." Not much has changed despite whatever the powers-that-be say about progress, says Chuck as he revokes his trust from an inherently flawed system. He closes his final verse with a great line about the 20th Century's relative proximity to 1564, the year Britain began its slave trade: "427 to the year, do you understand/That's why it's hard for the black to love the land."
Ice Cube - "I Wanna Kill Sam" (1991)
Seeing the cover for Ice Cube's Death Certificate, which shows Cube looming over a body with a toe tag marked "Uncle Sam," for the first time must've been pretty shocking to most Americans in 1994. This is the album's centerpiece, where Cube explains the reason behind the shocking cover. He's fed up with military recruiting in black communities, mocking recruitment officers' degrading manner in the intro and then launching into a tirade about the injustice of blacks fighting for the same country that's oppressing them. He closes the song with a "So bitch you can fight your own wars... I wanna kill Sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin Uncle!"
Scarface Feat. Ice Cube - "Hand Of The Dead Body" (1994)
In 1988, N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton prompted a wave of outrage about "gangsta rap" and its alleged influence on violent crime, and that controversy continued to cause problems for rappers all throughout the '90s and beyond. Geto Boy Scarface begins this highlight from his sophomore album The Diary with a fake newscast that pins his music as the root cause of drug distribution, the degradation of women, violence, and gambling, and he goes on to perfect illustrate how and why rappers are being used as scapegoats for the country's many problems. "Why you trying kick some dust up," he asks in an on-the-nose moment in his first verse, "America's been always known for blaming us n*ggas for they fuck-ups/And we were always considered evil/Now they trying to bust our only code of communicating with our people."
As we move to Face's second verse, and Ice Cube's closing bars, it becomes clear how relevant this message still is today. Face directly single out the KKK's David Duke, who you may remember is a vocal Trump supporter, and Cube's got disses aimed at one of gangsta rap's main adversaries in the '90s, Reverend Calvin Butts, as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton. This monster of a track not only united the West Coast and the South for one of the first times on record, it made an incredibly strong case that those trying to censor rap music were actually harming the world much more than any rapper.
The Coup - "5 Million Ways To Kill A CEO" (2001)
The Coup is Oakland native Boots Riley's funk/rap hybrid group who are behind some of the smartest anti-capitalist music of the past 25 years. "5 Millions Ways To Kill A CEO" is taken from their 2001 album Party Music, which originally had artwork that depicted an explosion engulfing the World Trade Center. Oddly enough, the group created the cover three months before 9/11, but it was still enough to land them in hot water, especially due to the album's lyrical content.
This track focuses on the many ways that the super rich control the world: "They own sweats shops, pet cops and fields of cola/Murder babies with they molars on the areola/Control the Pope, Dali Lama, Holy Rollers, and the Ayatollah." As a businessman with no political experience is about to take office, Riley's words and rage ring truer than ever. If you're feeling fed up or hopeless tomorrow, just focus in on this song's last verse, where Riley make good on the title and describes various ways to kill the greedy: "You could throw a twenty in a vat of hot oil/When he jump in after it, watch him boil /Toss a dollar in the river and when he jump in/You can find out if he can swim."
Dead Prez - "Know Your Enemy" (2002)
"How we gon' fight to keep freedom when we ain't got it?" Like Public Enemy, Dead Prez have way too many songs that fit on this list to include just one, but when it comes to an anti-presidential sentiment, "Know Your Enemy" takes the cake. Boldly proclaiming "George Bush is way worse than Bin Laden is," Stic.man and m1 explain how the US's political and social climate led to the War on Terror, starting with the fact that "Bin Laden was trained by the CIA" (source), and going on to illustrate how the government's greed knows no limits, reaping spoils from inner cities as well as oil wars.
Lil Wayne - "Georgia... Bush" (2006)
The Bush years brought us a lot of meaningful protests from rappers, whether they were addressing 9/11, for-profit prisons, or his administration's poor response to Hurricane Katrina. Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't care about black people" statement got more attention, but it was New Orleans native Lil Wayne who dropped the most nuanced knowledge on the tragedy. On this Dedication 2 cut, as well as Tha Carter III's "Tie My Hands," Weezy explains how the government basically left the citizens of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods for dead, either stranded on their roofs or floating face down in a pool. "Georgia... Bush" wins out because it manages the cross-generational feat of sampling a Ray Charles song and linking the levees' failure to a similar hurricane in 1965. By citing the failures of not only Bush, but also Lyndon B. Johnson years prior, Wayne shows how this country has systematically favored its wealthy citizens for decades.
Brother Ali - "Uncle Sam Goddamn" (2007)
Sometimes the best critique is satire, and that's what Brother Ali harnesses for this track's hook. Over an old school, down-south-sounding instrumental, he rips the US of A a new one by reconfiguring one of its most popular slogans: "Welcome to the United Snakes/Land of the thief, home of the slave." Ali goes on to address multiple problems and hypocrisies: the War on Terror, slavery, taxes paying for wars and prisons, and most relevant to today, the fact that poor white people are often oppressed by the government in ways similar to members of other races, but they're still the most racist people in America.
Killer Mike - "Reagan" (2012)
It's pretty crazy that one of the best anti-Reagan tracks came out some 23 years after he left office (especially considering how many amazing anti-Reagan punk, rap and rock songs there were in the '80s), but Killer Mike, who was 14 in 1989, clearly had enough memories to work with. Taken from his pre-Run The Jewels comeback album R.A.P. Music, this centerpiece is perhaps the best crash-course in the popular theory that the Reagan Administration's protection of Central American leaders with ties to the cocaine trade led to the crack epidemic of the '80s and '90s. Mike names the most prominent member of the administration associated with these deals in the song: "Oliver North introduced us to cocaine/In the 80's when the bricks came on military planes." In the second verse, he turns closer to home, showing the impact that this had on black America, and then zooms out to show how the Bush, Clinton, and Obama presidencies have all taken part in this massive injustice as well. Managing to cram a history course's worth of facts into a four minute track, Mike made one of the best recent critiques of US foreign and domestic policy.
A Tribe Called Quest - "We The People" (2016)
Combining some of the most sinister, ferocious sounds in rap history, Q-Tip jacks the synth tones from Ice-T's "Colors," Andre 3000's distorted megaphone vocal stylings from "Da Art Of Storytellin' Part 2," and the oft-sampled drum break from Black Sabbath's "Behind The Wall Of Sleep" to create 2016's second-best anti-Trump anthem. Tribe have had their political moments in the past, but never as many in one place as there were on last year's We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, which crucially arrived just a few days after the 2016 election. "We The People" led the charge, raging against the unjustified police murders of young black kids across the country, the numbing effect of reality television, the IRS' frequent targeting of rappers, waves of gentrification sweeping America's cities, and most importantly, the underlying message of Trump's campaign:
"All you Black folks, you must go
All you Mexicans, you must go
And all you poor folks, you must go
Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways
So all you bad folks, you must go"
YG Feat. Nipsey Hussle - "FDT" (2016)
Whereas other songs on this list may reference obscure historical events or dig deep into political policy, "FDT" does nothing of the sort. Instead, it lays its message right out the table for you, plain and simple. Sometimes, that strategy (pardon the word choice) trumps any amount of research or nuance.