Singer Joe Strummer cheekily sings, “You have the right not to be killed / Murder is a crime / Unless it was done by a / Policeman or aristocrat.” As true today as the day it was sung. Ice Cube would go on to write a number of anti-police brutality songs including “ Who Got the Camera,” “ The Predator” and “ Endangered Species,” featuring Public Enemy’s Chuck D.Ģ) The Clash - “ Know Your Rights”: The Clash kicked off 1982’s “Combat Rock” with this cut, which outlines your rights - and exactly how they’ll inevitably be quashed by the powers that be. Other anti-police brutality songs titled “Fuck the Police” include tracks by the late J. There’s too many apt and great lyrics to quote here, but the opening lines are a good place to start: “Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground / A young n*gga got it bad cause I'm brown / And not the other color so police think / They have the authority to kill a minority.” Word has it the FBI warned Ruthless Records about the song’s lyrical content pre-release, apparently, to little avail. Tipper Gore and the PMRC’s endless pearl clutching over the group’s debut album, “Straight Outta Compton,” only helped drive record sales higher (especially among suburban white kids, the only demographic they cared about protecting anyway).
#Bad boy song cops movie#
Dre was best known for pricey headphones and Ice Cube was a family movie star, the two were part of the outfit that changed hip-hop - for both better and, undoubtedly, worse - launching gangsta rap and putting Compton on the national map. “ Fuck tha Police”: The mother of all contemporary anti-police-brutality songs, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” is a rap classic and still, more than 25 years later, the ultimate “fuck you” to the cops. But here, in no particular order, are just 20 of them.*ġ) N.W.A. There are of course, far too many anti-police-violence songs to round up in a single list. These songs build on a long history of music that protests the horror of police brutality and abuse.
Cole (whose “ Be Free” may have been the most gut-wrenching of all) recorded tracks to address police brutality and the harrowing loss of black life. In response to Ferguson, artists including G-Unit, Public Enemy, The Game, T.I. Musicians have long attempted to speak to police violence through song. Twenty-odd years after the Rodney King verdict and the Los Angeles riots, the Eric Garner decision is yet more proof that police brutality is as much a part of our system of policing and criminal justice as it ever was. What is new - thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones and other recording devices - is recognition beyond the black community of its frequency, viciousness and, with few exceptions, the impunity with which the majority of abusive officers are treated.
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