Vic Mensa released one of 2016's more pointed political albums with There's a Lot Going On, finding a focus for his newly enraged music in police brutality and self-examination. Mensa wrote an op-ed for Billboard that elaborates on those themes in the wake of Donald Trump's U.S. election win. Mensa recounts feeling "woozy" upon learning of the results and proceeds to share his thoughts on a variety of subjects including why the poor shouldn't blame each other, how Trump supporters should be reached out to after "we've been preaching to the crowd this whole time," and that nothing would have changed for black Americans had Hillary Clinton won because "this nation was not built to serve our interests."
Advertisement
Read the rest of the essay here and watch Vic Mensa's "16 Shots" video below.Phil is a Noisey staff writer. He's on Twitter.I don't sing the national anthem. This is not "my country, 'tis of thee." This is not a sweet land of liberty for people who look like me and not has been. So, yeah, the white nationalist groups and the KKK are being empowered right now and they're getting bolder, but they were there. They've been there. We've been getting killed in the streets by police like dogs with a black president in the White House and there's no accountability for those white officers. We already had to mother----ing watch our back. This was not a safe place for us to begin with.