NEW MUSIC: FAHAMU PECOU x KILLER MIKE
The last time Fahamu Pecou and Killer Mike joined forces, it resulted in a timeless work of cover art for a classic album: 2012’s R.A.P. Music. This time, the visual artist/academic joins the rapper/activist on the mic for the killer premiere of “Emmett Still.”
The new single doubles as the title song of an album and accompanying short film bearing the same name. Both are part of Pecou’s most ambitious and multi-disciplined solo exhibition to date — DO or DIE: Affect, Ritual, Resistance, which opens August 26 at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
It comes at a time when the diminished value of black bodies is on constant display across the nation. In Pecou’s exhibit, he seeks “to elevate and re-contextualize Black life and death” through performance, painting, drawing, and film that incorporates references ranging from Yoruba/Ifa ritual and Negritude philosophy to hip-hop.
While Emmett Still isn’t Pecou’s first serious endeavor behind the mic (see All Dat Glitters Ain’t Goals), it may be his most compelling. The forthcoming 4-song release scores the short, with the title song coming at a pivotal point in the visual narrative. The title, of course, is a play on the name of the 14-year-old Chicago native whose 1955 lynching in Money, Mississippi became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. Strangely, Emmett Till, once representative of the terror of a seemingly bygone era, has again become symbolic of an ever-present injustice that never left us.
"Emmett Still, we still Emmett/mothers cry over open caskets/they sons in it," Pecou raps. Over a fugue-like death march, at once haunting and entrancing, Pecou and Killer Mike lament this inheritance with sound opposition. "I represent the people po-po never loved/a hundred years ago we was lynched, we was drug," Mike spits. "A hundred years later still face down in the mud/but I'ma tell you dirty ass devils one fact/you better get hip [cause] we will shoot back."
The song, produced by NerdPac aka Brian Harrison, is bookended by another familiar voice of resistance, James Baldwin, who would’ve turned 92 this month. “Isn’t 400 years enough?” Baldwin’s words, spoken half a century ago, ring out midway through the song. “The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship or my right to live there — how can it still be in question now?”
The excerpt comes from Baldwin’s seminal 1965 debate against conservative William F. Buckley at Cambridge University over the question, “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”
Source: http://www.clatl.com/music/article/20830359/premiere-fahamu-pecou-killer-mike-cry-freedom-on-emmett-still
