For white musicians, it’s always been romantic to imagine living outside the law.
“I fought the law and the law won,” the Bobby Fuller Four sang in the mid-1960s, and the girls and boys swooned. “When I fight authority, authority always wins,” John Cougar Mellencamp crowed on MTV in the early 1980s, looking anything but defeated.
For Black singers and songwriters, however, a brush with the law often means the distinct possibility of encountering deadly violence. For more than 30 years, hip-hop America — from N.W.A to Run the Jewels — has grappled with racial profiling and the ever-present prospect of police brutality. But that tension has been evident in popular music since the earliest years of the recording industry.
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Nearly a century ago, in a song called “Police Dog Blues,” the deft guitarist Blind Blake cast racial intolerance as a woman who “said she didn’t like my kind.” The woman kept a vicious police dog: “His name is Rambler, when he gets a chance/He leaves his mark on everybody’s pants.”
Dom Flemons, the contemporary “American Songster” who records music from the folk tradition — he was a founding member of Carolina Chocolate Drops — cites several songs from his repertoire that reference police harassment. Charley Patton’s “Tom Rushen Blues” (1929) is about a notoriously abusive Mississippi sheriff, Flemons says. And Rosa Henderson’s “Chicago Policemen Blues” is a vaudeville blues with a message: “They send you away for absolutely nothing at all.”
A few years ago, Flemons was in a North Carolina field at night, filming a video for his recording of “In the Jailhouse Now.”
“It was meant to show the symbolic nature of being in the headlights,” he said. While filming, “the cops actually showed up and asked what we were doing.”
He first heard Jim Jackson’s “Bye, Bye, Policeman” on a compilation of medicine-show songs from the 1920s and ‘30s. The lyrics describe an illicit game of craps and an officer who vows to break it up: “He said, ‘Stop there, boy! I’m the law, I’ll shoot you, Bill’/I turned around and looked at him, said, ‘Reckon you will?’ ”
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Styles evolved, but the theme carried on. Sonny Knight, a journeyman R&B singer who got his start in the 1950s, cut a novelty song called “But Officer.” While the musical setting is a playful “Hucklebuck”-style R&B dance tune, Knight’s one-sided “dialogue” with a policeman quickly grows from comical to fraught: “Officer, I can’t get my hands no higher! . . . Looky here, officer, will you let me get one word in?” The song ends ominously, with the sound of a jail door slamming.
Modern jazz artists, playing a mostly instrumental form of music, protested police brutality in their own way. Shortly after the Selma marches of 1965, the guitarist Grant Green recorded an eight-minute song called “Selma March” that reflected both the despair and the determination of the demonstrators, who were assaulted by state troopers and segregationist vigilantes.
In 1972, the saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded the album “Attica Blues,” with a feverish, funky title track inspired by the recent prison riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, N.Y., where the mostly Black inmate population had protested inhumane living conditions. More than 30 inmates and 10 corrections officers were killed. Singing the words to a poem written by drummer Beaver Harris, guest vocalist Carl Hall and a pair of backing singers, Joshie Armstead and Albertine Robertson, capture the clamor of the riot and the collective anguish: “I’m worried about the human soul.”
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Then as now, the younger generation was wary of police misconduct. The wry political songwriter Phil Ochs imagined America’s intervention in foreign affairs as another kind of aggressive policing in the savage satire “Cops of the World” (“Our pistols are hungry and our tempers are short … Our boots are needing a shine, boys”). In England, a band called the Equals — featuring a young Guyana native named Eddy Grant, who would go on to 1980s pop stardom as a solo act — recorded “Police on My Back,” a song made famous in the Clash’s cover version.
Through the 1970s, many international musicians addressed the scourge of police violence head-on. Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” (1976) — “all the peacemakers turned war officers” — would become one of reggae’s most enduring hits. (It too was covered by the Clash.) The Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, whose political music so infuriated the government’s military that 1,000 soldiers attacked his compound, recorded several songs about the conflict, including “Sorrow Tears and Blood.”
In the United Kingdom, the reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, a Jamaican immigrant, recorded the powerful “Sonny’s Lettah,” in which the narrator writes to his mother from prison. Sonny has killed a cop while defending a friend who was unjustly roughed up while being accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The song is subtitled “Anti-Sus Poem,” after the so-called British “sus” law, which permitted police to stop and search anyone who simply looked “suspicious.”
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Several notable cases of injustice were commemorated in song in the 1980s. In 1980, Gil Scott-Heron, who recorded “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” released one called “Angola, Louisiana” honoring Gary Tyler, an inmate at the state prison there who, despite maintaining his innocence, was at the time the youngest person on death row. That same year, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” introduced the wider world to the killing in police custody of the South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko. In England, the uproar over the 1983 shooting death of Colin Roach in the lobby of a London police station moved Sinead O’Connor to write “Black Boys on Mopeds.” England, she sings, is not the “mythical land of Madame George and roses/It’s the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds.”
The late 1980s and early ‘90s, now considered the “golden age” of hip-hop, brought not just the famous N.W.A rap with the unprintable title, but many more songs about police harassment of young Black men. Public Enemy railed against the apparent disregard for communities of color on “911 Is a Joke.” On his 1991 debut album, Tupac Shakur rapped about the persistence of police intimidation on “Trapped.” KRS-One made the siren call of the New York City streets — “woop woop!” — a recurring motif on “Sound of da Police,” on which he compared officers to plantation “overseers”: “Change your attitude, change your plan/There could never really be justice on stolen land.”
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While the history of popular music has all these and many more examples of songs about inequality before the law, the recurring incidents documented in the age of cell phones and body cameras have launched a barrage of songs recorded in righteous indignation. On tour in 2012, Bruce Springsteen revived his song “American Skin (41 Shots),” about the 1999 police shooting of an unarmed Amadou Diallo as he reached for his wallet — “Is it a gun, is it a knife, is it a wallet?/This is your life” — in honor of Trayvon Martin. Two years later, Lauryn Hill released her song “Black Rage” in response to the killing of Michael Brown and the protests in Ferguson, Mo. As if in tandem, Vince Staples put out a song called “Hands Up,” and The Game released “Don’t Shoot.”
After the death in police custody of Sandra Bland, the artist known as Blood Orange wrote a reflection called “Sandra’s Smile.” And Jay-Z rushed out the single “Spiritual” — “No, I am not poison” — following the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
But one of the most forceful songs on this grim subject might be Ben Harper’s “Call It What It Is,” released in 2016. “They shot him in the back/Now it’s a crime to be black,” Harper sings.
Call it what it is, he insists: murder.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.
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In popular music, a long history of anguish and outrage over police brutality - The Boston Globe
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