Rap Music Has Always Reflected Reality
RIP Lucas Foster, RIP Fredo Santana
In 2018, after Fredo Santana passed away from a seizure stemming from longtime drug abuse, Lucas Foster wrote about him for the Rap Up on PassionWeiss.com. I noted on twitter the other day that this piece of writing is my favorite short-form music writing ever, because I believe it tells necessary truths about rap music, drugs, and life in America. Foster wrote:
“Fredo Santana has not been eulogized as much as beatified. While properly canonizing his legend requires understanding his complexities, and coming eye to eye with them is deeply uncomfortable, the discomfort reveals someone greater than a tragic antihero. On either side of a tattoo no one outside of Englewood can understand, a thousand yard stare reflected his enormous personal struggle, eventual triumph, and all of the crumbling institutions that he outmaneuvered. Understanding him as a product of failing societal mechanisms alone is still inappropriate. He did more for his family and his city than we will ever know, and happened to create powerful, historically significant music along the way. It was always ridiculous to see moral panic about his music when, from the start, he looked at you with that sort of pain. Now it’s maddening to see anti-drug PSA’s attached to his death. Drugs aren’t a hip hop problem, they don’t appear as an outgrowth of the cultural malfeasance of those dang rappers with face tattoos. Fredo told us explicitly that he was off drugs to cope with the sort of acute PTSD most addicts know through Hurt Locker. Ask the 30-year old white guy in South Ohio who just had his sixth fentanyl OD why he’s doing dope; it isn’t because he saw a double cup in a music video. We’re all getting high because it’s the best way to fill the void that the collapsing social order tears open a little further every day that capitalism gets a little later. Every time another self-righteous dilettante uses the death of a man like Fredo to start posturing behind a twitter pulpit, we’re that much further away from understanding why hip-hop is enamored with drugs in 2018. Hip-hop has always reflected and magnified reality, and Fredo put his 10x magnifying glass on realities and revealed more (while saying little) than a thinkpiece ever could.”
This writing is even more poignant in light of Foster’s death from an accidental drug overdose in the midst of the pandemic. Foster, like Fredo, was the product of the collapsing social order under late capitalism, but they both managed to make some great art in spite of it all. I am always amazed when I hear people like Jeff Weiss tell stories about Lucas being homeless, writing his music pieces on his iPhone while couch surfing and wandering LA. It reminds me of the young people making drill music in Chicago, many of them homeless and impoverished, but still managing to make timeless art that has influenced the world.
Even though drill artists like Fredo Santana and his cousin Chief Keef were able to make it out of the slums and provide for their families despite everything working against them in this society, they were demonized to no end and banned from performing in their hometown of Chicago by the city’s police and politicians. “Tough on crime” advocates believe that drill music itself causes violence, instead of the other way around — the violence and the extremely precarious lives of young Black men in Chicago is what gave rise to the music, because as Lucas Foster wrote: rap music has always just reflected and magnified reality.
What Foster wrote about drugs and rap music, you can easily apply to violence and rap music. The drugs and violence would exist in society even if you could somehow get rid of the music altogether, which some people seem intent on doing. The music is just a reflection of that reality, and people who make art will always be shaped by their environments. Young people on Chicago’s South and West sides are making drill music, and sometimes engaging in violence, in order to “fill the void that the collapsing social order tears open a little further every day that capitalism gets a little later,” as Foster wrote. It is no coincidence that the most violent areas of Chicago are also the most impoverished, underemployed, under-resourced, and abandoned by capitalism. People attack the music and the individuals like Fredo Santana and blame them for the violence and the drugs in order to distract from these larger structural causes. As drill music expert Professor Forrest Stuart told me:
“Some folks target the music itself, as though if we could just erase that music… if we could just lock up everybody making that music, the problems that are associated with it would just go away. Which I think is just so naive and so pollyannaish. But it almost feels like intentional ignorance because we have to remember that as you mentioned… what we’re hearing in the songs and what we’re seeing in music videos is just the manifestation of the ground-level conditions that are intergenerational, that are reflective of not just, like, state neglect, but state injustices and state violence that have been perpetrated on the communities that this [music] is coming out of, right? And so I think it forces us to ask, why? Why would a sixteen-year-old young person want to engage in this artistic endeavor that could land them in jail, that could in a rare occasion, land them dead… or at minimum, cause some incredible difficulties in their life. Like, what conditions have to be present such that someone would go to these lengths to risk their freedom and their life to make some songs? I think that’s really the question that we need to ask…”
What would it take to mitigate the violence and the drug epidemic in this city and country? Well, we certainly know that heavy-handed policing and mass incarceration isn’t helping, and is actively making the situation worse in many respects. Police continue to lock up and harass drill rappers and drug users, creating further instability that can cause violence or drug use to intensify. As Professor Suzanne Carlberg-Racich told WBEZ Chicago: “We’re framing the opioid crisis [and violence] as a criminal issue instead of a public health issue or a human issue… The more we talk about criminal approaches, the more we will see mass deaths.”
Treating the overdose epidemic and gun violence epidemic as public health issues would mean radically different funding priorities than what exists today. It would require funding violence prevention programs at hundreds of millions of dollars more than current levels. It would require ending poverty, segregation, and unemployment. It would require investing in safe consumption sites and other proven harm reduction models. It would require ending the police “wars” on drugs, guns, gangs, and ultimately on people. It would require taking on the gun industry as well as Big Pharma. Violence interruption and harm reduction have both been proven to save lives, but city and federal governments do not invest nearly enough in these programs.
Writers like Fredo Santana and Lucas Foster were products of their environments, but they were able to make lasting art despite everything that was working against them. May they rest in peace, along with everyone else in Chicago and the world who has been lost to violence and drugs. May we build another world where violence prevention and harm reduction are funded by billions of dollars, instead of police departments and prisons.
