Vulture Magazine The Michaelmas Issue 2013 | Page 12
Black supremacist music: a
reaction to historical
oppression
Matt Broomfield
“
This is the Final Call, on white man and
white woman, rich and poor... come together for this white mastery”. You might assume
these lyrics are from the Horst-Wessel-Lied
or some other Nazi marching song now confined to the shelves of a Holocaust museum.
Failing that, perhaps they were penned by an
unhinged Fascist broadcasting poorly-written
death metal songs to an audience of twelve on
an obscure Youtube channel. In fact, with one
small change, the man responsible for these
words has a net worth of over $145,000,000
and has seen his albums go double platinum.
Substitute “black” for “white” in the lines
above and you have, word for word, a line
originally rapped by hip-hop icon Ice Cube.
If a white man of such fame and popularity sung or rapped these lyrics, casting white
people in the role of the “masters”, there
would be outrage. But Ice Cube is a household name, ranked the 8th best MC of all time
by MTV. Yet it is difficult to view the message
propagated by the more extreme proponents
of black supremacy as any less hateful than
that put across by their white equivalents.
In August 2012, a man named Wade Page shot
dead seven people, including himself, at a Sikh
temple in Wisconsin. Wade Page played in two
white power bands, whose names alone -End
Apathy and Define Hate- speak volumes (and
are still less extreme than those belonging to
associated acts such as Jew Slaughter, Fueled
by Hate and White Terror). Clearly, this seriously disturbed man was influenced by the lyrics
of the culture he immersed himself in even as
he fed back into it through his own artistic endeavors. His bands’ websites were swiftly taken down following the shootings, but the lyrics
of a band he once played with, the Blue-Eyed
Devils, are fairly representative of their agenda, as when they sing “kill the Jew and cut off
his head”. However, on a purely linguistic level, it is difficult to see what makes these lyrics
any less acceptable than lines such as “shoot
you with my 22/I got plenty crew/I take out
white boys, that’s scary” from Da Lench Mob’s
Buck the Devil. The titular Devil in this song
from Ice Cube’s protégées is not the devil of
traditional Judeo-Christian or Islamic teaching. This is the devil of the Nation of Islam, of
the Five-Percenters, of Ice Cube and a host of
other rappers- this is the white man as devil.
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