Stand Up to the Government with Rappers and Transcendalists

Hey guys! So I was listening to my some of my favorite songs the other day and I realized something. I realized that many of the songs I was listening to share similarities with some famous transcendentalist and dark-romantic essays. What I noticed was that both the songs and the essays expressed that our own experiences play an important role in developing our personal emotions. It is my understand that these experiences, and therefore emotions, are unavoidable. This is because such experiences occur in all different settings and environments, whether that be socially, politically, physically, or even mentally. There is a number of examples of songs and an essays sharing that same base setting or environment and in turn invoking very similar emotions. The most obvious instance of this idea is with the 80s rap song “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy and the essay “Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau. I noticed in his essay, Thoreau outlines a bunch of different ways the government unjustly intrudes into his own life and freedom. Public Enemy also addresses the government, specifically on how the government has a restrictive and limiting attitude towards race. Both of the works discuss detrimental government progress, and their respective authors are overcome by strong emotions. These strong emotion drive both authors to call for action. Thoreau expressed that “Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them”, and Public Enemy outright states the “We've got to fight the powers that be”. The similarity between Public Enemy’s song and Henry David Thoreau’s essay is obvious: the entire sequence from setting to emotion to response for both the rap song and the essay share the same basic themes. 

See you soon and don't forget to FIGHT THE POWER!