Posted by Benjamin on: 05.16.2008 /
I saw this for the first time this week, and must have watched it at 30 times since. It continues to get me.
The Song is currently at #3 on Billboard’s Hot Modern Rock Tracks.
Would love to hear your reactions.
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Comment by: Hannah
1 05/18/08 11:51 PM | Comment Link |I’ve heard the song before and I liked it because it had a nice underproduced sound. Listening through the second time, I thought about how it starts off with a lot of childlike things, “De Colores” and making comic books, and progressed to doing awful things anyway he pleased because he could. “I’m destructive because I can be. I have the power and you don’t.”
How often do we step in when kids pick on each other for things that they can’t do and tell them that a person is worthy of respect regardless of abilities? I work at a grade school and I see those kinds of things a lot. “Look what I can do. Haha, you can’t!”
Then they grow into middle and high schoolers and divide into cliques that exclude and persecute. Some of them grow up and assume they’re entitled to certain things because they’re more important than the rest. Then you get people like my uncle who think that homeless people should just clean up and get jobs. Please don’t let your children or their friends grow up without understanding that might doesn’t make right.
It’s a song about power and pride. We’ve got the power to make antibiotics if our pride doesn’t blow that power into a holocaust. I think it’s about time that rap music start meaning something again.
Comment by: Benjamin
2 05/20/08 12:48 AM | Comment Link |Hannah,
thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Do you think your own experiences in grade school shaped the importance to you of the issues about how kids treat each other in your work place now?
Comment by: Hannah
3 05/20/08 5:30 PM | Comment Link |When I was in grade school, I was a smarty pants and shoved it in everyone’s face. When it started making me enemies, I didn’t understand why until I was much older. My school was small enough that it escaped a lot of the clique-ism that happens in bigger communities, so I as much just don’t understand hierarchy as I dislike it.