Comments | egosumnoah: Dead Prez

egosumnoah

Dead Prez

Jul 22, 2007 16:08

I was just listening to this Dead Prez track, "They" Schools. I don't want to say "it offended me" because that word is kinda gross, but I had a hard time listening, though I tried, and wound up cutting it off at about 3 minutes. What the fuck. You want to give back, you wanna represent? You friggin priss. Fine, don't go, and maybe you heard some ( Read more... )

Comments 7

heatscan July 23 2007, 18:22:04 UTC

don't worry, only college students listen to dead prez

egosumnoah July 24 2007, 17:04:08 UTC

i thought college students believed in getting a high school diploma

heatscan July 25 2007, 07:43:09 UTC

i honestly don't think the vast majority of college students believe in getting a diploma so much as they happen to have diplomas because they grew up in a situation where graduating high school was both easy and expected ( ... )

kleisthenes July 25 2007, 16:08:54 UTC

Wow, I had a completely different take on this song. It's been a long time since I heard it, since my copy of the CD was... borrowed... freshman year, but I thought they were trying to point out some of the problems of relevance within the school system. When they say "They schools don't teach us shit" the implication I read is "Fix these schools so they do help us." It's worth noting that generations after the abolition of slavery, America is still perpetuating a pretty big economic disparity across racial lines. I don't know if I'd agree that the blame for this falls so heavily on the schools, but that's what I understood the lyrics to be saying; reform the school system, rather than drop out.

heatscan July 25 2007, 18:18:20 UTC

from what i've gathered dead prez advocate a fairly radical quasi-seperationist view along the lines of setting up networks of small self-policed black socialist communities.

i don't think they're saying "fix the schools" as much as they're saying "fuck your schools, we don't want to learn how to be cogs in the white man's capitalist system, we want to learn how to build sustainable socialist communities and we can do that through grassroots education."

egosumnoah July 27 2007, 00:39:28 UTC

I guess I just have a problem with this reactionary bullshit, liberals blindly advocating revolution instead of reform. You're right though, I don't know what those schools were like.

kleisthenes July 27 2007, 04:51:42 UTC

well, you know, maybe they want to fix the schools by turning them into part of a radical separatist community...

I don't really know the group, I just heard the album. I don't think the song ever suggests a solution one way or the other, which is probably my biggest point of contention; they don't tell me to fix things, they don't tell me to drop out... they just complain.