Jun 3, 2020
‘PIG FEET’ Is The Protest Anthem You’ve Been Clamoring For
The daily torrent of news pouring out of America has grown beyond sickening. Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Denzel Curry, Daylyt and G Perico can take no more, and express their frustration, anger and disgust through the medium they excel at: their music.
The police is targeting protesters against excessive police violence with even more excessive police violence, shoots at the shoots at the international press with rubber bullets and punches down camera crews without warning. The white supremacist group Identity Evropa poses Antifa-activists to incite further violence, and the national guard has been deployed to shoot paint canisters at people on their own porches while they march down the streets like a paramilitary strike force. And the president? That rancid sack of potatoes masquerading as an amateur dictator, directs officers to lob concussions grenades and tear gas at a church, including many of the clergy present there, just to clear the area for a photo op of him holding a Bible there, pretending he’s a Christian.
Make no mistake, this is fascism. It has become impossible not to follow Godwin’s law when the current situation in the US resembles the Italy or Germany of the 1930s to a tee. With the notable exception that the violent mobs of brown- and blackshirts back then, are the ones in blue holding a badge in the here and now.
It is in effect America’s biggest gang. Their rotten apples, no matter how putrid they’ve become, are treated with relative benevolence or hidden from plain sight without consequence for their actions, time and again. Of course there are good cops among them. But every officer who lends himself to upholding this corrupt system, and to distort democracy, is part of the problem. Everybody that chooses to justify their actions, is part of the problem. Everybody that still chooses to look away, is part of the problem.
Producer Terrace Martin, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, rappers Denzel Curry, Daylyt and G Perico cannot permit themselves to look away. They speak out through the medium they excel at: music. Their song PIG FEET is a defiantly stomping, furiously surging protest-anthem, in which jazz fusion and hiphop collide in a way that makes sparks of raw funk fly.
Denzel Curry, whose own brother died through police violence years ago, sets the tone through his opening verse: “Helicopters over my balcony / If the police can’t harass, they wanna smoke every ounce of me”. Daylyt subsequently tears loose: “You see the pigment we depict, the indigenous people dig it / Hold on to life, we don’t go for the house of reps / They done trapped us in the alphabet / Our alphas can’t get out the net”. Whoever wants to know what it feels like to have goosebumps while your blood boils, only has to press ‘play’.
And then there’s its video. A compilation of real life footage, ripped from social media over the past few days. “The video to this song is happening outside your window right now,” reads the text preceding it. Most harrowing however, might be what looks like its end credits. After all musicians have raged through their bristling concoction, a list of names of black citizens killed by police scrolls past the screen. It almost immediately takes up the entire space, but it still takes a full minute and a half(!) before the entire list has run past the viewer.
The silence you hear while that realization sinks in, might be just as overpowering as the three minutes of expertly expressed pain and anger that precede it.
