June 11, 2020 • 34 mins
For nearly one hundred years, Black revolutionary and cultural organizations have been surveilled, infiltrated, and sabotaged by the United States government. But why? And how? In this weeks episode, hosts Dope Knife and Linqua Franqa discuss this seedy, largely untold history of FBI's entanglements with Black music and Black politics, from Nat King Cole and Martin Luther King Jr. to Tupac, Biggie, and the mysterious deaths of Ferguson activists. They also delve into the implications of government surveillance for the George Floyd uprising and explore the legacy of the FBI's history of covert violence in Hip Hop, from the Dayton Family to Kendrick Lamar.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening waiting on reparations the production of iHeart Radio. Hey,
you ain't no reparations. Uh. I see these snipers what
they I host set cripple lay rifles and they white supreme.
But what I figured that the spipe fool pets people
getting is that it's my whole set. I'm just the
ticket head of generation why and Z. I know my
ideas won't die even if I'm modern, My squad will
(00:24):
go harder. My movement goes farther, goest barrow. I'm proof
that any good with a good heart could finished whore
I started. Who is Mariah Parker Man? It doesn't even
matter if I'm really being honest, and honesty is the
quality we need to leave the charge. We need defeat
the sparkle beat. The doctor sees completely the ton of
may we screaming barker, bleeding hearts would do it. I'm repeat,
So we have we blocked the streets betweet in march
for better policy. Yes, I wish it wasn't me, but
(00:44):
God damn it, it's gotta be. I'm not a champion
or a panther. I'm just standing with my hands up.
The man answers handing over. It's my man's turn. You know,
I'm walking to my dealer. They spraying so the clouds
of Brave my life in the thriller. I'm trying to
earn my modest pay. If they want to follow, well,
it's not like you can drive away while you listen.
And they're saying, I'm only trying to buy a wake
him up, shake them up. I wanted to, but they
doubted it. Swapped Meet Louis World looking like its counterfeit rass,
(01:07):
chase cheese, and settle for fake accomplishments. Rappers should do
like Nasco and wait the corporate sponsorship, his ice cream
and every color. When you for your president, you can
only pick the fuck up from two living like there's
nothing to do. And when we stuck, they abused because
we confuse freedom with just being comfortable. They're loving me
smoke pure, nothing to go and fade away. Everything is
like the whole game is stuck on lay wait and
pay to make a plate, but they'll pay to make
(01:29):
a prison. Should is rape. It's got you tell you
in your position, fuck it, they don't listen a yap
yo le franca. My name is dope knife and we
are waiting on reparations. Hey, so how's your how's your week?
It's been better? Um, I have fucking coronavirus. Yes, this
(01:49):
I know, of course, because you know, of course that's
my roommate. I went after the protests in the march
on Sunday, having been around a couple of thousand people, uh,
you know, decided to go get tested last Wednesday. And
I waited in line for three hours and got my
test back in back a few minutes and found out
that I have fucking coronavirus. So what was I like?
(02:10):
I mean, what was it like taking this house? It
was like scary. I mean, like I saw that video
online of them like shoving the Q tip into your brain,
and like I was so scared. I flinched. All I
did was swab the right like just inside my nose.
But I was like flinching. It's like like the whole time.
And then you know, I was fine. But they didn't
like jam it in there. They did not jam a
QUE tip into my brain. Yeah, thankfully, but yeah, technological advantage.
(02:34):
I know, we're good places in America. Finally catching up
with South Korea, well yeah, I mean I I of
course I went on self quarantine since it doesn't been
hiding this room like hard. I mean, I mean the
chances are that, you know, like if you live in
the house with somebody. I don't know that I have it.
I really don't. I know that you have it. I don't.
(02:56):
Didn't hear that about coronavirus when when you get it
you can sense it. Another piece of people being gay.
So I'm just locking around here rowing it up. Well,
I mean I haven't. I haven't gotten any symptoms yet.
I'm on as we're recording those. I'm on my seventh
day of lockdown since I was exposed quote unquote, So
(03:19):
I mean, yeah, you know, yeah, my symptoms have only
been pretty mild. I went to the hospital last night, uh,
because I was having chest pains and like my home
oximeter said my oxygen levels were really low, and so
I called a couple of hot lines. They were all like,
you should call one one. It was pretty scary. I
was really scared. But then I went to the hospital
for a couple of hours and they did chest X
(03:41):
rays and I don't have pneumonia, so they it's like
I went through like stages. Because it's like when you
when you told me. You were like, yo, I got
the ron up, and I was like, ah, fuck, all right,
because we recorded the episode, so I guess I got
the road to too right. So like for the first day,
I was like sad. It was sucked up. The you know,
(04:02):
episode one was coming out the next day and I
was all sad, like, man, I got the roadap you
kept having like a spirit and energy about you that
was just it was like damn, well, right, Yo, we're
gonna beat This is gonna be fine. And then like
you're like, yeah, I gotta go to the hospital. I
was like, oh no, yeah, I'm doing good. I mean
I've been facing a lot of backlash online. I was
(04:22):
like very transparent immediately when I found out. I posted
on Facebook that I have coronavirus and it got shared,
I don't know, four hundred times, and like everybody from
fum funk anywhere that hates the liberal blue dot of
Athens was giving me shit about having led this margin
Sunday and uh that sucked. But um, you know, I've
(04:46):
faced a lot of harassment before as like a public
figure of public you know, public servant, And I also
just wanted to emphasize that I'm certainly not letting this
fucking stop me. Like, like you said, I've had some
energy anyway. Yeah, I don't feel good, but like all
day today, I've been planning another protests, this time a
car caravan through the streets of Athens. We are partnering
(05:09):
with the local radio station to have them play revolutionary
jams all night and have one of our comrades behind
the you know, in the booth speaking to the people,
and as we drive around the city to all the
locations where people were killed by cops last year, they're
gonna read biographies of those people who were killed so
we can pay homage to them. And then we're gonna
(05:31):
sucking shut down downtown Athens from a safe distance, so
you know, all my fellow COVID havers as well as
other vulnerable people can like participate in the movement in
the revolution. Finally, you know what's really funny, So people
(05:52):
online speaking of harassment and ship have been questioning whether
or not I've been given a false positive on my
coronavirus tests to silence me. I mean, what do you
think of that? I mean, I don't believe it, but
it's not out of the question given the ways that
like the government has surveiled that infortrated and sabotage black
(06:15):
lead cultural organizations and movements throughout history. There's like, there's
like a historical precedent for this kind of thing with
with me and things like that. It's like you always
have to think of the implications. It's like, so that
would mean that the people at the hospital didn't do
their job, or we're in on it potentially, you know
what I mean. It's like, I'm not saying that that's
(06:35):
out of the question. I'm just saying, like, is that
I asked the folks at the hospital to retest me,
and they were like, no, you know, false negatives are
far more common than false positive, so if you tested positive,
you probably have it. I'm not saying this is I'm
not saying there is a plot, but I'm just saying that,
like there's historical precedent. I'm just being Devil's advocate. There's
definitely a historical precedent for it. I mean that's with
(06:58):
the episode is to day, which is like the FEDS
or FBI or one time Faveaux, whatever you want to
call it, spying on various revolutionary movements and groups and individuals.
Now As far back as the nineteen thirties, black musicians
were monitored by the FBI for suspected involvement or forgiving
(07:19):
sympathy to revolutionary groups. From the likes of Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Nat King Cole, they were all
tracked by FBI. FBI records even show the agents would
repeatedly attempt to determine if Nat King Cole was a communist, sympathizer,
civil rights activists, or some kind of troublemaker. That's just
one example. So you've got that ship. And then in
(07:39):
the nineteen fifties and nineteen seventies you've got co intel
pro so like the series of covert FBI operations aimed
at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations, anything
from the Communist Party to the Nation of Islam, like
they were getting into animal rights and environmental activist groups,
the civil rights movement, and the black power moves. This
(08:01):
was like all under the Jagger Hoover regime of the administration.
So after nineteen sixty three, after the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out Martin Luther King Jr.
Is a major target for cointel Pro. The FBI infamously
sent MLK a letter in nineteen sixty four that was
encouraging and to commit suicide. Beginning in nineteen sixty nine,
(08:24):
coin tel Pro started targeting leaders of the Black Panther
Party and having them assassinated or falsely charged for crimes
they didn't commit and in prison or even publicly humiliated
and blackmail. The overall effect of this was just like
a general environment of Hayden foremants, illegal surveillance operations aimed
at intimidating, and a lot of this was officially uncovered
(08:46):
years or even decades later. But make no mistake, some
of this was actual illegal activity on the party straight up.
I mean they were engaged in research and study of
black culture, and they had files on music as theater, actors, magazines,
black independent bookstores, and it was all for the purpose
(09:06):
of infiltration. So yeah, so get this. In Night X,
FBI informant Darthurd Perry gave his account of the way
the FBI would study black culture musicians, comedians, actors to
better infiltrate black cultural organizations and revolutionary groups. During the
nineteen sixties, they study the profiles of celebrities who were
supportive organizations by like gathering intel on their psychological backgrounds,
(09:27):
their weaknesses, their strengths, their files and files on like
their sexual activity, and they use these weaknesses to get
further information out of them or disrupt their engagement with
political organizations. He for example, describes a sting involving Doc Holiday,
one of the leaders of the b GF or the
Black Gorilla Family, a Marxist Leninist narcotics prison gang, and
(09:48):
the California prison system. So they so they did this
sting where they planted a woman in his life who
became his lover to extract names, phone numbers, and other
information for him over several months when he was released.
But you know, it wasn't just like narcotics gang leaders
of Marxist Leninist persuasion. It was people like Sammy Davis Jr.
Perry was assigned to get close to Sammy Davis Jr.
(10:10):
And his staff and would videotape us whole office, including
numerous other celebrities that dropped in. Damn Niggas was snitching
way before Takashi. It was so much more at stake.
Perry himself also infiltrated the Watts Writer's Workshop, which was
a creative writing group initiated in the wake of the
devastating August Watts riots in South central Los Angeles, and
(10:31):
admits on camera in this interview to burning the workshop
to the ground on behalf of the FBI. When asked
if he thought these activities were still ongoing and at
the time of the interview, Perry laughed and emphatically a
sense that things escalated the year after year during coental
pro and probably had escalated even further after you left
the agency. Yeah, there's well documented evidence that the FBI
(10:55):
has continued to monitor black musicians to this day. For example,
the FBI has a mask the twenty eight page surveillance
file and R and B poet Neil Scott Heron from
the nineties, seventies and eighties, which identifies his ties to
socialist group to All Africans People's Revolutionary Party as an
extremist matter. Now, as far as hip hop's concern, I mean,
(11:17):
at this point, FBI surveillance might as well be a
fucking element. I mean, they've surveiled, investigated, and extorted rappers
for years. We've got Tupac Easy notorious b I G.
We're all uncovered to have been under surveillance n way
around the time of the the Police song. They were
actually sent a warning letter from the FBI, and in
(11:39):
twenty eleven, the FBI's National Gang Threat Assessment classified Juggalos
as a gang. Now, the Juggalos are like the fan
base or the community that's surrounding the rap group. The
insane clown posse, which the insane clown posts is like this,
you should just you should you should just contact your
pharmacists and ask them if in saying clown policy is
(12:00):
right for you, and yeah, take the recommended Does this
all led like this led to people who had this
gang designation, like getting you know, constant job promotion. Well,
I mean I can see it happening. I mean you
can't imagine it, like like I just know from circles
that I know, like people like clown on Jugglers to
(12:24):
begin with. Let alone, if you're trying to get hired
or like get into the military. So I can imagine
if somebody's trying to get a job or something and
someone who's like, you know, posting you at the gathering
of the Juggle or something that's like not cool. You
know what I'm saying. Yeah, um, you know. Actually I
used to have some rap proteges. I had like an
opportunity to open up for insane clown posse, and I
(12:47):
ended up sending my rap proteges to do it so
that I could do a different like festival thing. But
they covered those boys in fuego. The nixas was all sticky,
But I think they had fun though. So I mean,
here we go, like, we got mountains of evidence that
(13:09):
the government has surveilled haapotage and committed acts of violence
against revolutionaries and musicians in a systematic way for almost
one years. And then you have the fact that over
the last six years, six Ferguson activists have turned up dead.
A November fourteen, the morning after the grand jury declined
to indict Mike Brown's killer, twenty year old DeAndre Joshua,
(13:32):
close friend of Dorrian Johnson, who was with Michael Brown
on the day of Mike's death, was found dead, reportedly
inside a burned car after being shot in the head.
In September two thousand sixteen, twenty nine year old Darren Seals,
a prominent figure in the Ferguson protests, suffered a similar
death to Joshua. His body was found inside a burning
car after having been shot as well. Like what the
(13:54):
fuck is that? Then you got Shawn Gray, who was
three years old when he went missing the same that
Joshua died, and was later found it drowned in a river.
A medical examiner ruled the death and accidental drowning, with
alcohol poisoning as a major contributing factor, according to the
Louis St. Louis Post Dispatch. But then in two thousand eighteen,
in November bass and Mass three, a Palestinian American man
(14:17):
who live stream videos at the Perkusan protests, was found
overdose on fennyl on a bus. Edward Crawford Jr. Seven
was featured in the famous photograph from Ferguson throwing a
gas canister back at the police. Police determined that he
died by suicide. May two thousand seventeen. In October two
(14:38):
thousand eighteen, twenty four year old Danye Jones was found
dead in the yard of a St. Louis Holmes. It
was also ruled a suicide. Okay, so these don't quite
look in quack like ducks. I will give them that
people kill themselves people due too many drugs. I've been
really close to doing both many times in my life.
But like you know, and I'm not saying it was
(15:01):
the government. It could easily, you know, be white supremacist groups,
or it could just be two murders and four folks
who snapped under the tremendous pressure of doing this work
and either took their own lives or self medicated themselves
into an early grave. In either case, it's still white
supremacist violence against people of color. Harassing and humanizing someone
to the point they killed themselves in the yard is
(15:23):
still white supremacy at work. And who knows how many
countless people who weren't prominent figures in the movement also
took their lives in the aftermath of Ferguson feeling helpless
to stop what's happening in this country and surrendering. I mean,
and I think what this also tells us is that
this is war. If you you know, want to talk
about David mcgaddy shot by cops while leaning out the
(15:43):
door of his restaurant in Louisville couple weeks ago, maybe
just last week, or Sarah Grossman who died of an
asthma attack after being hit with tear gas or even
had they're higher, the protesters are struck and killed by
a white supremacist car and Charlotte's go in two thousand seventeen.
People are dying for this and they will continue to
die for this, in my belief, until we win. And
(16:05):
I think it's some of that people, particularly white people
who are new to this work, kind of have to
be prepared for when they are signing up for the
spite Do you think white people should be prepared to
die for this movement? I mean, I think everybody should
be prepared for violence. I mean, when you're trying to
jake up any system, you can expect violent reaction or
(16:26):
violent opposition to change all the time. I think that, Um,
we're in like an environment right now where I think
a lot of a lot of the Trump stuff that
I don't think people are paying attention to is like
if Trump looks into the camera and tells his supporters
to do some dumb ship, there's a lot of people
(16:49):
who would be willing to do some dumb ships. How
many people were calling medical hotlines to try to figure
out whether or not they should drink bleach, so yeah. So,
I mean and and even to this day, I mean,
like we were just talking about all this stuff with
the FBI surveillance. I mean, to this day, they're still
doing this disproportionate focus on left wing groups or left
(17:11):
wing activity with like a blind eye to right wing
extremists and ship. It's like, um, in two thousand and seventeen,
the FBI sent out a secret memo warning about the
rise of Black identity extremists. And this is like in
the this is the same year that this is the
same year as Charlottesville. I got money, you know what
I'm saying. So it's like weird that they have this
(17:33):
focus for Black Lives Matter or antifas like movements and organizations.
They haven't killed anybody, but then they turn a blind
eye to some of these right wing groups they got
like mad bodies on them. Well with like these the
Black Panthers had some shootouts, yeah, but I mean it
wasn't a lot of that in like retaliation though. I mean,
(17:53):
it's not like they started like, hey, we're coming out
the gate attacking the FBI or some ship like that. Yeah. None, right,
you're right. I mean, everybody's all up in arms about
State violence as they should be, particularly police violence. But
then there's all all this evidence about tracking and monitoring, disruption,
all these covert kinds of violence and control that because
we can't film it with our camera phones and we
(18:14):
can't watch watch it on the news, people are paying
attention to it. So people keep saying stuff like, oh,
be safe out there are your protests, but like there's
so many other levels to safety with regards to combating
state violence that like people aren't talking about stuff like
encrypting your text messages, like don't send sensitive things via
email or even text. Call people if you have, if
(18:37):
you're making plans, if you're doing direct action and organizing
around it. Um, because we don't fully grasp the scope
and scale of the surveillance operations that the FBI is
capable of, just use common sense and like act as
if the ship is not like a game we live
I mean, and we were living in. We're living in
(18:58):
like the overshare yea era where like everyone thinks it's
so cool to like bust out all their fucking secrets online.
It's like, yo, it's not cool. I mean, it's cool
to party. I was really moved by like Saturday, the
people dancing in the streets, and like they were like
doing line dances and swing dances and and like I
love that kind of spirit to these things, where like
(19:19):
we're reclaiming our streets joyously as well as in grieving.
But also don't treat it like a fucking party in
the sense of like opening yourself up to um, getting
your friends nabbed by the cops because you posted pictures
of their faces from the protest online, or your text
messages get intercepted in which you're discussing bringing cones to
(19:40):
the protests to help diffuse or neutralize tear gas canisters.
Like that kind of ship UM could get you popped.
So don't do it, or do it in an encrypted,
safe way, a safe way as possible. So it's like,
(20:01):
how do we handle it? What? What does all this
mean during this time? How do does taking precaution even matter?
Are we just defenseless against the state? Yeah, until there's
until there's until there's like a fundamental change from within.
I don't think that at any point yet there's been
(20:23):
an elected official or somebody who has worked their way
up the ranks of the system who is in the
mind frame of you know, let's take power away from
the state. So until that happens, I think the states
just like too powerful for it to change, because you know,
people are trying to get it to the way we've
been going about it. People have been protesting for years.
(20:43):
It's ultimately going to have to like have to be
the effort from within. Yeah, I've been telling people lately
we cannot take away their guns with our hands. That
these last two weeks, I've shown us that, well, we
can take away their guns with our laws. We can
take away their power with their laws. We can let
slate all of their ammunition away, we can shrink them
(21:04):
like I you know, people want to talk about a revolution,
and that's all cool and fine. I draw a lot
of strength from revolutionary movements of old, but like, we're
not going to overthrow the government. No. Like if they're
if you know, like if they're reading all our text
messages and they're infiltrating our cultural groups in burning them
to the ground, and I feel like in all this,
(21:26):
you know, understanding this history, it underscores the importance of
protecting the identities of people. At these protests, everybody wants
to live stream and take their little selfie with their
cute little like hashtaggable sign. But you have to protect
the I didn't they say the people this protest because
people are going missing, people are dying, They are watching us.
I mean, they've got secret police out there in the streets,
(21:49):
blur the faces of people in your videos. If you're
live streaming live stream from the shoulders down, I you know,
I couldn't be at the protest here on Saturday because
I have fucking coronavirus. But you know, I was able
to follow along with a live streamer who was just
showing people's feet, and that was enough for me to
hear the music being played over the speakers and see
that people were dancing, and that gave me so much hope,
(22:11):
even from being stuck at home. You know, if you're
out there, cover up identifying tattoos with bandages before you
go out, and add you to covering your face, wearing
swim goggles protect you from tear gas, and it also
helped conceal your identity to protect you from targeting and
harassment from state and identitarian hate groups. So how does
it feel to not trust the state when you're part
(22:32):
of the state. It's really complicated because I want to
give people hope that change is possible electorally given all
that we have described, like we were not going to
take their power away, um with by force. Um. So,
like I really truly want to get as many people
(22:54):
engaged in govern incident democracy as possible and like do
this kind of of X education where people understand how
that works enough to participate. Um. But like I've seen
first hand the way that like what the policy makers
do is such a limited part of the actual process.
You have all the other people behind the scenes who
(23:15):
are running all of the departments that are building all
the roads and uh driving all the buses and uh
laying all the sewer pipes that like, you know, we
might be anti racist and if you're me, anti capitalists,
but like these ideologies are so deeply ingrained and embedded
in like the workings of of keeping a city running
(23:38):
in itself. Um. And so I feel like it's a
really weird tight rope to walk where like I have
to work with these people and it's really important to
have like a sense of mutual respect and an understanding
of where they're coming from in order for us to
find moments of coalition. Is that hard to do? To
see where they're coming from. No, I feel like I'm
(23:59):
a good listener, like even if I have to kind
of fake it at first, but like just openly listening
like helps facilitate that dialogue. Um. So like I come
from like government workers, so that sometimes helps me be
a bit more. None of your people were elected, right, No, no, No,
except for your cousin into Montana. But so all your people,
(24:20):
everybody in your family is just taking orders from someone
that also probably wasn't elected. And so it's those parts
of government where it's like we can rabble arouse all
day and pass policy all day, but like there's so
many invisible gears churning in the government that people don't
even think about. It's like sometimes in our heads we
can kind of attached a sort of boogeyman figure to it,
(24:44):
but it's I worked for the federal government for like
a short period of time, and it's it's really like
a lot of people sitting at desks like clocking in,
and one of those people who are sitting at deaths
and weren't elected. Um, like what do they believe? We
don't know, We don't interr but they're all just doing orders.
It's the same sort of dynamic as when we're talking
(25:05):
about the cops. It's a job, you know, Like a
lot of these things are just jobs to the people
that do them. That's not necessarily an excuse for anything.
I can sometimes understand where they're coming from because I
know it's just other human beings that make it up.
It's not like some some supernatural force that we're as people,
And it underscores importance to me of like people who
don't know what their role in all this is. We
(25:27):
need people who work in the planning department in your
local in your local city government, or who work in
the human resources department, or who work in the transportation
department or the public utilities office to like help undo
white supremacy as it manifests there as well. Because I can't.
I can't. I'm gonna elected official, but I can't be
(25:48):
paying attention to all that. I can try my best,
But folks on the ground who are working on pushing
paper in those offices, we need people to do that
work in an anti racist way too, if possible. So
I don't know, if you're like, well, I don't know
what my point isn't what my part is, and all
this I'm not out here marked in the streets. I
don't really like tweeting, Like I don't know what to do, Like, well,
(26:10):
do you work an office job? Can you do it
in an entire racist way? What does that look like
for you? Um? And infiltrating the government in like a
less romantic sense regarding like all the other machinery of
it that turns along without any sort of oversight from
direct you know, like electoralism that changed from within, Like
(26:33):
I was saying, Yeah, so let's um talk a little
bit about RAPS relationship with the FBI. So do you
think we're paranoid because of this history or is it
more about drug dealing and gang activity. I think it's
kind of like a combination of both, but mainly legacy
(26:54):
because a lot of this stuff carried on over you know,
you know, the same way that certain civil rights its
error groups kind of morphed into the gangs, the street gangs.
It's kind of like that same sort of thing. So
like the state suspicion you know that was already looking
into like the cultural aspects of black people. Yeah, like
(27:17):
the Black Panthers gradually dissipated and then like just regular
rask gangs kind of replaced them in terms of the
way communities were organized, you know, things like that. I
do think that it definitely maybe it's like psychological I
believe I believe in generational trauma. I think Black people
just trust to the state generally. You know, it's concretized
(27:37):
in our history of being targeted by entities like the FBI.
It's something that lives in us physically and psychologically. And
so a rapper might not point back to nat King
cole beings are built by the FBI and say that's
why I don't trust the FEDS. But like, not trusting
the Feds, it's just in our blood as a people. Yeah,
I can funk with that, and I think it definitely
(27:59):
contributes to a broader sense of paranoia that's in hip hop,
of like constantly thinking that you're being underminded, or that
you've got haters or somebody's watching you. Motherfucker's is out
to get you or backstab you, and you can't trust anybody.
That's like a common theme in hip hop. You want
to look at some musical examples of how rappers have
dealt with this relationship to the FBI and this history
(28:22):
and their music yeah, sure, So do we get up first? Yeah.
So our first example is from the Dayton Family, which
is the nineties rap group from Flint, Michigan. UM. There
are music largely focused on the you know, the grittiness
of survival, and the song is FBI. It's after a
second album in nineteen sixty nine. If the song is
called FBI, it's off their second album entitled FBI, which
(28:45):
is you know, stood for fun being indicted, where they
describe paranoia about being hunted down by the cops of
the FBI. Stop. Yes, dirty cops, clean you took the
father from the family, you know what. Literally, I'm gonna
be honest with you. I did not know about these
cats before. Yeah, no, I never. I didn't hear about this. Thanks.
It's pretty hard, but I have wrapped over that beat
(29:07):
mad times that like ciphers, are like hip hop functions.
So yeah, I don't think it's I think it's obscure
to us, but I think I think heads know about that.
It was funny. I was looking in their Wikipedia page
actually has them under gangster rap in horrorcore. That's funny.
So up next, we got public Enemy Louder than a Bomb.
(29:29):
Now I'm assuming everybody knows whose public enemy is the
famed Wrap group from the eighties and nineties fronted by
Chuck d and Flavor Flavor. Now. In this they talk
about wire tappings and assassinations of MLK and Malcolm X.
I'll Never Live Alone. Yeah. And then we have dead
(29:49):
Press Pop Propaganda. Dead Press as a hip hop duo
out of New York. The song Propagandas off their two
thousand album Let's Get Free for It makes reference to
Council Prope specific the death of Puee Newton when he
talks when he says, who brought the churches to the
ground with no evidence found? It's not coincidence. Too many
steady incidents. It would have been a plan. Put that
(30:09):
bomb at the eleftly spot. It probably was the dusty
m hm, I love that song. Then we got Kendrick
Lamar with Mortal Man and uh, he's got the line
where he's like, if I'm tried in the court of
law in the industry, cut me off cocaine, would you
judge me a truck kid? See? What was this one
off of Butterfly? How many leaders you needed? And then
(30:32):
you left him for dead? Is that Moses is that
Huee Newton or Detroit Red, Detroit Red being a reference
to Malcolm X who went by the name Detroit Red,
but he had he dyed his hair red and like
like straightened it would lie back in his pimp days.
And then up next we got phone Tapped by the Firm.
(30:53):
Now a lot of people don't remember the Firm, but
the Firm was like a short lived supergroup back in
the day, consisting of as Nas and Foxy Brown, and
I do think Dr Dre was doing some of the
beats for them. But the song phone Tap was really
dope checking out the Dynasty. What made this song really
(31:16):
clever to me is like the entire song is like
a conversation between people knowing that they're tapped by the Feds,
like on the other end of the line. And then
it's got Dr Dre doing the hook as one like
the Feds like, we got your phone tap, what you're
gonna do? So later we got your whole crew? Now
we really need is what wrote two? Got you all
stuck like glue and y'all through. And for this last one,
(31:40):
it's kind of an honorable mentioned in a way, but
it was the first song that came to my mind,
and we thought of this episode. It's an old Masterpiece song.
I used to be a huge O Limit fan back
in the day, but it was a master p and
Soaked the Shaker song called Somebody's Watching Me. It was
a It was a cover of the old eighties joint
(32:02):
I always feel like somebody I'm never don't I'm in
the dump, Jake. I think you think it's nothing, Jimmy May.
They kind of did their own playoff of it, but
made it about the feeds tapping your phone and watching
you and ship. So at the end of the day,
(32:24):
you know, I mean, like hip hop has revolutionary roots,
as we're probably going to discuss in future episodes like that,
it just all kind of comes full circle, you know.
So I think that's this episode. That's it for today.
I feel like wrapping, of course, but let me just
do a little shameless plug real quick. I got an
ep that I dropped last week, so go check it out.
(32:48):
I want to say the name of it, but I
don't know if there's like an ethics dispute with that,
so let me find that out first. But let's get
that be popping. Let's hit it. We're waiting on our reparations. Hey,
(33:12):
we're waiting our reparations. Hey, sometimes it feels like I'm
always being watched by the fans, by the white supremacists,
and the cops got my personal security people watching my
house to cut My message is encrypted, as if they
could even stop them from listening to the topics. I'm
whispering in the darkness. I'm showing up but their partners
and executing it us in the paranoias, cousin Sarah destroying
(33:34):
the confidence, filling byers to prepare my lawyers with the documents.
I went and cut the fuck Rona went on a
little walk to help man is my bipolar can't even
take a stroll of a hike without a toll on
the right, patrol on the bikes looking over my shoulder. Hey,
you know they got a monopoly, so they dropped the economy.
But no one's really bothering because we wobble de wobble.
You see. Now, that's what the problem, being surprised philosophy,
(33:55):
So you know they're probably the prophecies with the prophets
being Now I'm feeling kind of mad, so I'll make
fish feeling like a rat and amaze for kicks. I
don't really know just what to make of it. Fucks
the throat shots, I make a miss. I'm in the
cipher without talking to Agent Smith, up in my backyard,
grilling on some charcoal, looking at the cam trail, puffing
onto Marlboro. This is how they do it. When they
move in, it'll start slow on your neck. I'm getting
(34:17):
pretty soon will be a bar code as mad documents.
They never should have burned, So we just wait until
an episode occurs and the rates getting raised by the
federal were reserved. A bunch of other ship niggas never
would have heard. Y'ALLNA listen. He be safe out there. Everybody.
Get tested for coronavirus and make sure your social distance
(34:38):
while you're fighting the power. Waiting on Reparations as a
production of iHeart Radio. Listen to Waiting on Reparations on
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
You're listening waiting on reparations the production of iHeart Radio. Hey,
you ain't no reparations. Uh. I see these snipers what
they I host set cripple lay rifles and they white supreme.
But what I figured that the spipe fool pets people
getting is that it's my whole set. I'm just the
ticket head of generation why and Z. I know my
ideas won't die even if I'm modern, My squad will
(00:24):
go harder. My movement goes farther, goest barrow. I'm proof
that any good with a good heart could finished whore
I started. Who is Mariah Parker Man? It doesn't even
matter if I'm really being honest, and honesty is the
quality we need to leave the charge. We need defeat
the sparkle beat. The doctor sees completely the ton of
may we screaming barker, bleeding hearts would do it. I'm repeat,
So we have we blocked the streets betweet in march
for better policy. Yes, I wish it wasn't me, but
(00:44):
God damn it, it's gotta be. I'm not a champion
or a panther. I'm just standing with my hands up.
The man answers handing over. It's my man's turn. You know,
I'm walking to my dealer. They spraying so the clouds
of Brave my life in the thriller. I'm trying to
earn my modest pay. If they want to follow, well,
it's not like you can drive away while you listen.
And they're saying, I'm only trying to buy a wake
him up, shake them up. I wanted to, but they
doubted it. Swapped Meet Louis World looking like its counterfeit rass,
(01:07):
chase cheese, and settle for fake accomplishments. Rappers should do
like Nasco and wait the corporate sponsorship, his ice cream
and every color. When you for your president, you can
only pick the fuck up from two living like there's
nothing to do. And when we stuck, they abused because
we confuse freedom with just being comfortable. They're loving me
smoke pure, nothing to go and fade away. Everything is
like the whole game is stuck on lay wait and
pay to make a plate, but they'll pay to make
(01:29):
a prison. Should is rape. It's got you tell you
in your position, fuck it, they don't listen a yap
yo le franca. My name is dope knife and we
are waiting on reparations. Hey, so how's your how's your week?
It's been better? Um, I have fucking coronavirus. Yes, this
(01:49):
I know, of course, because you know, of course that's
my roommate. I went after the protests in the march
on Sunday, having been around a couple of thousand people, uh,
you know, decided to go get tested last Wednesday. And
I waited in line for three hours and got my
test back in back a few minutes and found out
that I have fucking coronavirus. So what was I like?
(02:10):
I mean, what was it like taking this house? It
was like scary. I mean, like I saw that video
online of them like shoving the Q tip into your brain,
and like I was so scared. I flinched. All I
did was swab the right like just inside my nose.
But I was like flinching. It's like like the whole time.
And then you know, I was fine. But they didn't
like jam it in there. They did not jam a
QUE tip into my brain. Yeah, thankfully, but yeah, technological advantage.
(02:34):
I know, we're good places in America. Finally catching up
with South Korea, well yeah, I mean I I of
course I went on self quarantine since it doesn't been
hiding this room like hard. I mean, I mean the
chances are that, you know, like if you live in
the house with somebody. I don't know that I have it.
I really don't. I know that you have it. I don't.
(02:56):
Didn't hear that about coronavirus when when you get it
you can sense it. Another piece of people being gay.
So I'm just locking around here rowing it up. Well,
I mean I haven't. I haven't gotten any symptoms yet.
I'm on as we're recording those. I'm on my seventh
day of lockdown since I was exposed quote unquote, So
(03:19):
I mean, yeah, you know, yeah, my symptoms have only
been pretty mild. I went to the hospital last night, uh,
because I was having chest pains and like my home
oximeter said my oxygen levels were really low, and so
I called a couple of hot lines. They were all like,
you should call one one. It was pretty scary. I
was really scared. But then I went to the hospital
for a couple of hours and they did chest X
(03:41):
rays and I don't have pneumonia, so they it's like
I went through like stages. Because it's like when you
when you told me. You were like, yo, I got
the ron up, and I was like, ah, fuck, all right,
because we recorded the episode, so I guess I got
the road to too right. So like for the first day,
I was like sad. It was sucked up. The you know,
(04:02):
episode one was coming out the next day and I
was all sad, like, man, I got the roadap you
kept having like a spirit and energy about you that
was just it was like damn, well, right, Yo, we're
gonna beat This is gonna be fine. And then like
you're like, yeah, I gotta go to the hospital. I
was like, oh no, yeah, I'm doing good. I mean
I've been facing a lot of backlash online. I was
(04:22):
like very transparent immediately when I found out. I posted
on Facebook that I have coronavirus and it got shared,
I don't know, four hundred times, and like everybody from
fum funk anywhere that hates the liberal blue dot of
Athens was giving me shit about having led this margin
Sunday and uh that sucked. But um, you know, I've
(04:46):
faced a lot of harassment before as like a public
figure of public you know, public servant, And I also
just wanted to emphasize that I'm certainly not letting this
fucking stop me. Like, like you said, I've had some
energy anyway. Yeah, I don't feel good, but like all
day today, I've been planning another protests, this time a
car caravan through the streets of Athens. We are partnering
(05:09):
with the local radio station to have them play revolutionary
jams all night and have one of our comrades behind
the you know, in the booth speaking to the people,
and as we drive around the city to all the
locations where people were killed by cops last year, they're
gonna read biographies of those people who were killed so
we can pay homage to them. And then we're gonna
(05:31):
sucking shut down downtown Athens from a safe distance, so
you know, all my fellow COVID havers as well as
other vulnerable people can like participate in the movement in
the revolution. Finally, you know what's really funny, So people
(05:52):
online speaking of harassment and ship have been questioning whether
or not I've been given a false positive on my
coronavirus tests to silence me. I mean, what do you
think of that? I mean, I don't believe it, but
it's not out of the question given the ways that
like the government has surveiled that infortrated and sabotage black
(06:15):
lead cultural organizations and movements throughout history. There's like, there's
like a historical precedent for this kind of thing with
with me and things like that. It's like you always
have to think of the implications. It's like, so that
would mean that the people at the hospital didn't do
their job, or we're in on it potentially, you know
what I mean. It's like, I'm not saying that that's
(06:35):
out of the question. I'm just saying, like, is that
I asked the folks at the hospital to retest me,
and they were like, no, you know, false negatives are
far more common than false positive, so if you tested positive,
you probably have it. I'm not saying this is I'm
not saying there is a plot, but I'm just saying that,
like there's historical precedent. I'm just being Devil's advocate. There's
definitely a historical precedent for it. I mean that's with
(06:58):
the episode is to day, which is like the FEDS
or FBI or one time Faveaux, whatever you want to
call it, spying on various revolutionary movements and groups and individuals.
Now As far back as the nineteen thirties, black musicians
were monitored by the FBI for suspected involvement or forgiving
(07:19):
sympathy to revolutionary groups. From the likes of Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Nat King Cole, they were all
tracked by FBI. FBI records even show the agents would
repeatedly attempt to determine if Nat King Cole was a communist, sympathizer,
civil rights activists, or some kind of troublemaker. That's just
one example. So you've got that ship. And then in
(07:39):
the nineteen fifties and nineteen seventies you've got co intel
pro so like the series of covert FBI operations aimed
at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations, anything
from the Communist Party to the Nation of Islam, like
they were getting into animal rights and environmental activist groups,
the civil rights movement, and the black power moves. This
(08:01):
was like all under the Jagger Hoover regime of the administration.
So after nineteen sixty three, after the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom, Hoover singled out Martin Luther King Jr.
Is a major target for cointel Pro. The FBI infamously
sent MLK a letter in nineteen sixty four that was
encouraging and to commit suicide. Beginning in nineteen sixty nine,
(08:24):
coin tel Pro started targeting leaders of the Black Panther
Party and having them assassinated or falsely charged for crimes
they didn't commit and in prison or even publicly humiliated
and blackmail. The overall effect of this was just like
a general environment of Hayden foremants, illegal surveillance operations aimed
at intimidating, and a lot of this was officially uncovered
(08:46):
years or even decades later. But make no mistake, some
of this was actual illegal activity on the party straight up.
I mean they were engaged in research and study of
black culture, and they had files on music as theater, actors, magazines,
black independent bookstores, and it was all for the purpose
(09:06):
of infiltration. So yeah, so get this. In Night X,
FBI informant Darthurd Perry gave his account of the way
the FBI would study black culture musicians, comedians, actors to
better infiltrate black cultural organizations and revolutionary groups. During the
nineteen sixties, they study the profiles of celebrities who were
supportive organizations by like gathering intel on their psychological backgrounds,
(09:27):
their weaknesses, their strengths, their files and files on like
their sexual activity, and they use these weaknesses to get
further information out of them or disrupt their engagement with
political organizations. He for example, describes a sting involving Doc Holiday,
one of the leaders of the b GF or the
Black Gorilla Family, a Marxist Leninist narcotics prison gang, and
(09:48):
the California prison system. So they so they did this
sting where they planted a woman in his life who
became his lover to extract names, phone numbers, and other
information for him over several months when he was released.
But you know, it wasn't just like narcotics gang leaders
of Marxist Leninist persuasion. It was people like Sammy Davis Jr.
Perry was assigned to get close to Sammy Davis Jr.
(10:10):
And his staff and would videotape us whole office, including
numerous other celebrities that dropped in. Damn Niggas was snitching
way before Takashi. It was so much more at stake.
Perry himself also infiltrated the Watts Writer's Workshop, which was
a creative writing group initiated in the wake of the
devastating August Watts riots in South central Los Angeles, and
(10:31):
admits on camera in this interview to burning the workshop
to the ground on behalf of the FBI. When asked
if he thought these activities were still ongoing and at
the time of the interview, Perry laughed and emphatically a
sense that things escalated the year after year during coental
pro and probably had escalated even further after you left
the agency. Yeah, there's well documented evidence that the FBI
(10:55):
has continued to monitor black musicians to this day. For example,
the FBI has a mask the twenty eight page surveillance
file and R and B poet Neil Scott Heron from
the nineties, seventies and eighties, which identifies his ties to
socialist group to All Africans People's Revolutionary Party as an
extremist matter. Now, as far as hip hop's concern, I mean,
(11:17):
at this point, FBI surveillance might as well be a
fucking element. I mean, they've surveiled, investigated, and extorted rappers
for years. We've got Tupac Easy notorious b I G.
We're all uncovered to have been under surveillance n way
around the time of the the Police song. They were
actually sent a warning letter from the FBI, and in
(11:39):
twenty eleven, the FBI's National Gang Threat Assessment classified Juggalos
as a gang. Now, the Juggalos are like the fan
base or the community that's surrounding the rap group. The
insane clown posse, which the insane clown posts is like this,
you should just you should you should just contact your
pharmacists and ask them if in saying clown policy is
(12:00):
right for you, and yeah, take the recommended Does this
all led like this led to people who had this
gang designation, like getting you know, constant job promotion. Well,
I mean I can see it happening. I mean you
can't imagine it, like like I just know from circles
that I know, like people like clown on Jugglers to
(12:24):
begin with. Let alone, if you're trying to get hired
or like get into the military. So I can imagine
if somebody's trying to get a job or something and
someone who's like, you know, posting you at the gathering
of the Juggle or something that's like not cool. You
know what I'm saying. Yeah, um, you know. Actually I
used to have some rap proteges. I had like an
opportunity to open up for insane clown posse, and I
(12:47):
ended up sending my rap proteges to do it so
that I could do a different like festival thing. But
they covered those boys in fuego. The nixas was all sticky,
But I think they had fun though. So I mean,
here we go, like, we got mountains of evidence that
(13:09):
the government has surveilled haapotage and committed acts of violence
against revolutionaries and musicians in a systematic way for almost
one years. And then you have the fact that over
the last six years, six Ferguson activists have turned up dead.
A November fourteen, the morning after the grand jury declined
to indict Mike Brown's killer, twenty year old DeAndre Joshua,
(13:32):
close friend of Dorrian Johnson, who was with Michael Brown
on the day of Mike's death, was found dead, reportedly
inside a burned car after being shot in the head.
In September two thousand sixteen, twenty nine year old Darren Seals,
a prominent figure in the Ferguson protests, suffered a similar
death to Joshua. His body was found inside a burning
car after having been shot as well. Like what the
(13:54):
fuck is that? Then you got Shawn Gray, who was
three years old when he went missing the same that
Joshua died, and was later found it drowned in a river.
A medical examiner ruled the death and accidental drowning, with
alcohol poisoning as a major contributing factor, according to the
Louis St. Louis Post Dispatch. But then in two thousand eighteen,
in November bass and Mass three, a Palestinian American man
(14:17):
who live stream videos at the Perkusan protests, was found
overdose on fennyl on a bus. Edward Crawford Jr. Seven
was featured in the famous photograph from Ferguson throwing a
gas canister back at the police. Police determined that he
died by suicide. May two thousand seventeen. In October two
(14:38):
thousand eighteen, twenty four year old Danye Jones was found
dead in the yard of a St. Louis Holmes. It
was also ruled a suicide. Okay, so these don't quite
look in quack like ducks. I will give them that
people kill themselves people due too many drugs. I've been
really close to doing both many times in my life.
But like you know, and I'm not saying it was
(15:01):
the government. It could easily, you know, be white supremacist groups,
or it could just be two murders and four folks
who snapped under the tremendous pressure of doing this work
and either took their own lives or self medicated themselves
into an early grave. In either case, it's still white
supremacist violence against people of color. Harassing and humanizing someone
to the point they killed themselves in the yard is
(15:23):
still white supremacy at work. And who knows how many
countless people who weren't prominent figures in the movement also
took their lives in the aftermath of Ferguson feeling helpless
to stop what's happening in this country and surrendering. I mean,
and I think what this also tells us is that
this is war. If you you know, want to talk
about David mcgaddy shot by cops while leaning out the
(15:43):
door of his restaurant in Louisville couple weeks ago, maybe
just last week, or Sarah Grossman who died of an
asthma attack after being hit with tear gas or even
had they're higher, the protesters are struck and killed by
a white supremacist car and Charlotte's go in two thousand seventeen.
People are dying for this and they will continue to
die for this, in my belief, until we win. And
(16:05):
I think it's some of that people, particularly white people
who are new to this work, kind of have to
be prepared for when they are signing up for the
spite Do you think white people should be prepared to
die for this movement? I mean, I think everybody should
be prepared for violence. I mean, when you're trying to
jake up any system, you can expect violent reaction or
(16:26):
violent opposition to change all the time. I think that, Um,
we're in like an environment right now where I think
a lot of a lot of the Trump stuff that
I don't think people are paying attention to is like
if Trump looks into the camera and tells his supporters
to do some dumb ship, there's a lot of people
(16:49):
who would be willing to do some dumb ships. How
many people were calling medical hotlines to try to figure
out whether or not they should drink bleach, so yeah. So,
I mean and and even to this day, I mean,
like we were just talking about all this stuff with
the FBI surveillance. I mean, to this day, they're still
doing this disproportionate focus on left wing groups or left
(17:11):
wing activity with like a blind eye to right wing
extremists and ship. It's like, um, in two thousand and seventeen,
the FBI sent out a secret memo warning about the
rise of Black identity extremists. And this is like in
the this is the same year that this is the
same year as Charlottesville. I got money, you know what
I'm saying. So it's like weird that they have this
(17:33):
focus for Black Lives Matter or antifas like movements and organizations.
They haven't killed anybody, but then they turn a blind
eye to some of these right wing groups they got
like mad bodies on them. Well with like these the
Black Panthers had some shootouts, yeah, but I mean it
wasn't a lot of that in like retaliation though. I mean,
(17:53):
it's not like they started like, hey, we're coming out
the gate attacking the FBI or some ship like that. Yeah. None, right,
you're right. I mean, everybody's all up in arms about
State violence as they should be, particularly police violence. But
then there's all all this evidence about tracking and monitoring, disruption,
all these covert kinds of violence and control that because
we can't film it with our camera phones and we
(18:14):
can't watch watch it on the news, people are paying
attention to it. So people keep saying stuff like, oh,
be safe out there are your protests, but like there's
so many other levels to safety with regards to combating
state violence that like people aren't talking about stuff like
encrypting your text messages, like don't send sensitive things via
email or even text. Call people if you have, if
(18:37):
you're making plans, if you're doing direct action and organizing
around it. Um, because we don't fully grasp the scope
and scale of the surveillance operations that the FBI is
capable of, just use common sense and like act as
if the ship is not like a game we live
I mean, and we were living in. We're living in
(18:58):
like the overshare yea era where like everyone thinks it's
so cool to like bust out all their fucking secrets online.
It's like, yo, it's not cool. I mean, it's cool
to party. I was really moved by like Saturday, the
people dancing in the streets, and like they were like
doing line dances and swing dances and and like I
love that kind of spirit to these things, where like
(19:19):
we're reclaiming our streets joyously as well as in grieving.
But also don't treat it like a fucking party in
the sense of like opening yourself up to um, getting
your friends nabbed by the cops because you posted pictures
of their faces from the protest online, or your text
messages get intercepted in which you're discussing bringing cones to
(19:40):
the protests to help diffuse or neutralize tear gas canisters.
Like that kind of ship UM could get you popped.
So don't do it, or do it in an encrypted,
safe way, a safe way as possible. So it's like,
(20:01):
how do we handle it? What? What does all this
mean during this time? How do does taking precaution even matter?
Are we just defenseless against the state? Yeah, until there's
until there's until there's like a fundamental change from within.
I don't think that at any point yet there's been
(20:23):
an elected official or somebody who has worked their way
up the ranks of the system who is in the
mind frame of you know, let's take power away from
the state. So until that happens, I think the states
just like too powerful for it to change, because you know,
people are trying to get it to the way we've
been going about it. People have been protesting for years.
(20:43):
It's ultimately going to have to like have to be
the effort from within. Yeah, I've been telling people lately
we cannot take away their guns with our hands. That
these last two weeks, I've shown us that, well, we
can take away their guns with our laws. We can
take away their power with their laws. We can let
slate all of their ammunition away, we can shrink them
(21:04):
like I you know, people want to talk about a revolution,
and that's all cool and fine. I draw a lot
of strength from revolutionary movements of old, but like, we're
not going to overthrow the government. No. Like if they're
if you know, like if they're reading all our text
messages and they're infiltrating our cultural groups in burning them
to the ground, and I feel like in all this,
(21:26):
you know, understanding this history, it underscores the importance of
protecting the identities of people. At these protests, everybody wants
to live stream and take their little selfie with their
cute little like hashtaggable sign. But you have to protect
the I didn't they say the people this protest because
people are going missing, people are dying, They are watching us.
I mean, they've got secret police out there in the streets,
(21:49):
blur the faces of people in your videos. If you're
live streaming live stream from the shoulders down, I you know,
I couldn't be at the protest here on Saturday because
I have fucking coronavirus. But you know, I was able
to follow along with a live streamer who was just
showing people's feet, and that was enough for me to
hear the music being played over the speakers and see
that people were dancing, and that gave me so much hope,
(22:11):
even from being stuck at home. You know, if you're
out there, cover up identifying tattoos with bandages before you
go out, and add you to covering your face, wearing
swim goggles protect you from tear gas, and it also
helped conceal your identity to protect you from targeting and
harassment from state and identitarian hate groups. So how does
it feel to not trust the state when you're part
(22:32):
of the state. It's really complicated because I want to
give people hope that change is possible electorally given all
that we have described, like we were not going to
take their power away, um with by force. Um. So,
like I really truly want to get as many people
(22:54):
engaged in govern incident democracy as possible and like do
this kind of of X education where people understand how
that works enough to participate. Um. But like I've seen
first hand the way that like what the policy makers
do is such a limited part of the actual process.
You have all the other people behind the scenes who
(23:15):
are running all of the departments that are building all
the roads and uh driving all the buses and uh
laying all the sewer pipes that like, you know, we
might be anti racist and if you're me, anti capitalists,
but like these ideologies are so deeply ingrained and embedded
in like the workings of of keeping a city running
(23:38):
in itself. Um. And so I feel like it's a
really weird tight rope to walk where like I have
to work with these people and it's really important to
have like a sense of mutual respect and an understanding
of where they're coming from in order for us to
find moments of coalition. Is that hard to do? To
see where they're coming from. No, I feel like I'm
(23:59):
a good listener, like even if I have to kind
of fake it at first, but like just openly listening
like helps facilitate that dialogue. Um. So like I come
from like government workers, so that sometimes helps me be
a bit more. None of your people were elected, right, No, no, No,
except for your cousin into Montana. But so all your people,
(24:20):
everybody in your family is just taking orders from someone
that also probably wasn't elected. And so it's those parts
of government where it's like we can rabble arouse all
day and pass policy all day, but like there's so
many invisible gears churning in the government that people don't
even think about. It's like sometimes in our heads we
can kind of attached a sort of boogeyman figure to it,
(24:44):
but it's I worked for the federal government for like
a short period of time, and it's it's really like
a lot of people sitting at desks like clocking in,
and one of those people who are sitting at deaths
and weren't elected. Um, like what do they believe? We
don't know, We don't interr but they're all just doing orders.
It's the same sort of dynamic as when we're talking
(25:05):
about the cops. It's a job, you know, Like a
lot of these things are just jobs to the people
that do them. That's not necessarily an excuse for anything.
I can sometimes understand where they're coming from because I
know it's just other human beings that make it up.
It's not like some some supernatural force that we're as people,
And it underscores importance to me of like people who
don't know what their role in all this is. We
(25:27):
need people who work in the planning department in your
local in your local city government, or who work in
the human resources department, or who work in the transportation
department or the public utilities office to like help undo
white supremacy as it manifests there as well. Because I can't.
I can't. I'm gonna elected official, but I can't be
(25:48):
paying attention to all that. I can try my best,
But folks on the ground who are working on pushing
paper in those offices, we need people to do that
work in an anti racist way too, if possible. So
I don't know, if you're like, well, I don't know
what my point isn't what my part is, and all
this I'm not out here marked in the streets. I
don't really like tweeting, Like I don't know what to do, Like, well,
(26:10):
do you work an office job? Can you do it
in an entire racist way? What does that look like
for you? Um? And infiltrating the government in like a
less romantic sense regarding like all the other machinery of
it that turns along without any sort of oversight from
direct you know, like electoralism that changed from within, Like
(26:33):
I was saying, Yeah, so let's um talk a little
bit about RAPS relationship with the FBI. So do you
think we're paranoid because of this history or is it
more about drug dealing and gang activity. I think it's
kind of like a combination of both, but mainly legacy
(26:54):
because a lot of this stuff carried on over you know,
you know, the same way that certain civil rights its
error groups kind of morphed into the gangs, the street gangs.
It's kind of like that same sort of thing. So
like the state suspicion you know that was already looking
into like the cultural aspects of black people. Yeah, like
(27:17):
the Black Panthers gradually dissipated and then like just regular
rask gangs kind of replaced them in terms of the
way communities were organized, you know, things like that. I
do think that it definitely maybe it's like psychological I
believe I believe in generational trauma. I think Black people
just trust to the state generally. You know, it's concretized
(27:37):
in our history of being targeted by entities like the FBI.
It's something that lives in us physically and psychologically. And
so a rapper might not point back to nat King
cole beings are built by the FBI and say that's
why I don't trust the FEDS. But like, not trusting
the Feds, it's just in our blood as a people. Yeah,
I can funk with that, and I think it definitely
(27:59):
contributes to a broader sense of paranoia that's in hip hop,
of like constantly thinking that you're being underminded, or that
you've got haters or somebody's watching you. Motherfucker's is out
to get you or backstab you, and you can't trust anybody.
That's like a common theme in hip hop. You want
to look at some musical examples of how rappers have
dealt with this relationship to the FBI and this history
(28:22):
and their music yeah, sure, So do we get up first? Yeah.
So our first example is from the Dayton Family, which
is the nineties rap group from Flint, Michigan. UM. There
are music largely focused on the you know, the grittiness
of survival, and the song is FBI. It's after a
second album in nineteen sixty nine. If the song is
called FBI, it's off their second album entitled FBI, which
(28:45):
is you know, stood for fun being indicted, where they
describe paranoia about being hunted down by the cops of
the FBI. Stop. Yes, dirty cops, clean you took the
father from the family, you know what. Literally, I'm gonna
be honest with you. I did not know about these
cats before. Yeah, no, I never. I didn't hear about this. Thanks.
It's pretty hard, but I have wrapped over that beat
(29:07):
mad times that like ciphers, are like hip hop functions.
So yeah, I don't think it's I think it's obscure
to us, but I think I think heads know about that.
It was funny. I was looking in their Wikipedia page
actually has them under gangster rap in horrorcore. That's funny.
So up next, we got public Enemy Louder than a Bomb.
(29:29):
Now I'm assuming everybody knows whose public enemy is the
famed Wrap group from the eighties and nineties fronted by
Chuck d and Flavor Flavor. Now. In this they talk
about wire tappings and assassinations of MLK and Malcolm X.
I'll Never Live Alone. Yeah. And then we have dead
(29:49):
Press Pop Propaganda. Dead Press as a hip hop duo
out of New York. The song Propagandas off their two
thousand album Let's Get Free for It makes reference to
Council Prope specific the death of Puee Newton when he
talks when he says, who brought the churches to the
ground with no evidence found? It's not coincidence. Too many
steady incidents. It would have been a plan. Put that
(30:09):
bomb at the eleftly spot. It probably was the dusty
m hm, I love that song. Then we got Kendrick
Lamar with Mortal Man and uh, he's got the line
where he's like, if I'm tried in the court of
law in the industry, cut me off cocaine, would you
judge me a truck kid? See? What was this one
off of Butterfly? How many leaders you needed? And then
(30:32):
you left him for dead? Is that Moses is that
Huee Newton or Detroit Red, Detroit Red being a reference
to Malcolm X who went by the name Detroit Red,
but he had he dyed his hair red and like
like straightened it would lie back in his pimp days.
And then up next we got phone Tapped by the Firm.
(30:53):
Now a lot of people don't remember the Firm, but
the Firm was like a short lived supergroup back in
the day, consisting of as Nas and Foxy Brown, and
I do think Dr Dre was doing some of the
beats for them. But the song phone Tap was really
dope checking out the Dynasty. What made this song really
(31:16):
clever to me is like the entire song is like
a conversation between people knowing that they're tapped by the Feds,
like on the other end of the line. And then
it's got Dr Dre doing the hook as one like
the Feds like, we got your phone tap, what you're
gonna do? So later we got your whole crew? Now
we really need is what wrote two? Got you all
stuck like glue and y'all through. And for this last one,
(31:40):
it's kind of an honorable mentioned in a way, but
it was the first song that came to my mind,
and we thought of this episode. It's an old Masterpiece song.
I used to be a huge O Limit fan back
in the day, but it was a master p and
Soaked the Shaker song called Somebody's Watching Me. It was
a It was a cover of the old eighties joint
(32:02):
I always feel like somebody I'm never don't I'm in
the dump, Jake. I think you think it's nothing, Jimmy May.
They kind of did their own playoff of it, but
made it about the feeds tapping your phone and watching
you and ship. So at the end of the day,
(32:24):
you know, I mean, like hip hop has revolutionary roots,
as we're probably going to discuss in future episodes like that,
it just all kind of comes full circle, you know.
So I think that's this episode. That's it for today.
I feel like wrapping, of course, but let me just
do a little shameless plug real quick. I got an
ep that I dropped last week, so go check it out.
(32:48):
I want to say the name of it, but I
don't know if there's like an ethics dispute with that,
so let me find that out first. But let's get
that be popping. Let's hit it. We're waiting on our reparations. Hey,
(33:12):
we're waiting our reparations. Hey, sometimes it feels like I'm
always being watched by the fans, by the white supremacists,
and the cops got my personal security people watching my
house to cut My message is encrypted, as if they
could even stop them from listening to the topics. I'm
whispering in the darkness. I'm showing up but their partners
and executing it us in the paranoias, cousin Sarah destroying
(33:34):
the confidence, filling byers to prepare my lawyers with the documents.
I went and cut the fuck Rona went on a
little walk to help man is my bipolar can't even
take a stroll of a hike without a toll on
the right, patrol on the bikes looking over my shoulder. Hey,
you know they got a monopoly, so they dropped the economy.
But no one's really bothering because we wobble de wobble.
You see. Now, that's what the problem, being surprised philosophy,
(33:55):
So you know they're probably the prophecies with the prophets
being Now I'm feeling kind of mad, so I'll make
fish feeling like a rat and amaze for kicks. I
don't really know just what to make of it. Fucks
the throat shots, I make a miss. I'm in the
cipher without talking to Agent Smith, up in my backyard,
grilling on some charcoal, looking at the cam trail, puffing
onto Marlboro. This is how they do it. When they
move in, it'll start slow on your neck. I'm getting
(34:17):
pretty soon will be a bar code as mad documents.
They never should have burned, So we just wait until
an episode occurs and the rates getting raised by the
federal were reserved. A bunch of other ship niggas never
would have heard. Y'ALLNA listen. He be safe out there. Everybody.
Get tested for coronavirus and make sure your social distance
(34:38):
while you're fighting the power. Waiting on Reparations as a
production of iHeart Radio. Listen to Waiting on Reparations on
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
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