Rappers like to call their song or album “a problem”. But the problem I am referring to is revolutionary and societal. This is bigger than rap, bigger than Hip Hop. This is about using music to help spark change that strikes fear in the CIA, the Fed, etc.

The rich treat the poor like paupers. The mostly white ruling class treats people of color like monsters. But we’re not, we’re human beings (perhaps other than that one guy who took bath salts and became a zombie).

We can’t recover their conservative ideal of this country, because it was never real to begin with. Now more than ever the powerholders are confronted with this fact. There are more of us, and we are better organized to form a new country that does not discriminate based on race, class, gender, etc.

Cops can come on foot, in unmarked vans, even on bikes or horses. But they usually come by car. And they also bring THEIR laws and THEIR bars. And we are afraid because the laws are not designed to protect us, and we can be locked away for nothing. For this reason, we’ve always been warned to stay away from the cops and live by our own rules.

The fatherless child dilemma is real in impoverished neighborhoods. The good fathers are often working more than one job to help the family survive.

The military knows where to spend its advertising dollars. In areas where young people are not going to college and need a way out. Marine billboards, for example, paint a picture of foreign travel and earned respect and college tuition. This isn’t the real picture, but some kids join for the simple reason that they’re bored on their block.

I can only speak from my perspective. And I never speak ill about other rappers who talk about cars, clothes, jewelry, etc., in all of their music. There is a reason the culture is obsessed with these topics. When one is poor and observing the other side, the appeal of that other side becomes stronger and stronger. In other words, people want what they can’t (or haven’t) had. And our society celebrates material wealth, so who wouldn’t strive to attain it?

Bars on residential building windows is more than symbolism for the bars around prison cells and prison grounds. It has a profound emotional effect.

This song is about more than mass incarceration. It is about the entire unequal, unjust prison industrial complex. It is not a coincidence that areas that receive the least amount of funding for programs and have the least effective educational systems also have the highest murder and incarceration rates.

These two states are leading the nation in arresting and incarcerating people – and especially people of color. In California, news has also broken recently about forced immunizations of female prisoners. And the California Prison Hunger Strike in response to unjust and inhumane use of solitary is currently ongoing.