Her death is cited as one of the causes of the LA riots in 1992. The song is dedicated to Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old woman shot and killed by a shop owner in LA. I chose Tupac Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up” because delivers a positive message to one of the most oppressed groups in the US: poor, black women. Rap music provides many critiques of our world, especially as they relate to race, money, gender, and forms of criminal activity. I was drawn towards choosing a rap song for this week’s ethical analysis. After changing the gender pronouns, the song seems humorous and unrealistic. For example, if we were to take David Guetta’s “Sexy Chick” (at least that’s the name of the edited version). What happens when you switch “he” and “she” pronouns in a song (this is called the Willis test)? Does it still send the same message? Usually it doesn’t due to gender differences that result from sexism and misogyny. Keep your head up, because the redemption of the world is drawing near.One can learn quite a bit about societal perceptions of gender roles through listening to music. Keep claiming your own dignity and worth. Keep striving for justice, for mercy, for righteousness. For neither of them are these words meant to be platitudes, but rather, they speak to a deep truth that even when all hope seems lost, even when you’re fed up, the only real option is to keep your head up. As Jesus looks upon a world that seems hellbent on its own destruction, where power and might are the only things that seem to actually mean anything or hold any value, it seems just as odd that he too might tell the oppressed and the downtrodden to, in the words of Tupac Shakur, “keep ya head up.” Yet, that’s exactly what Jesus does. Having come out of a world that seemed like the future was absolutely hopeless, Tupac Shakur chose to write a song about keeping your head up. Women, especially as featured in this song, were often left to raise children all on their own, either because the father was dead, could’t afford a baby, or had moved on to… less fertile pastures. The men often took to the hustle to make enough money to eat and pay the rent. The deck was still stacked against young African-Americans born into the poverty. Much later in life, and now on the other side of the continent, Tupac wrote “Keep ya head up” in a situation in which not whole lot had changed. Fed up with racial profiling and police violence, the Black Panther Party, of which Tupac’s parents were both active members, was, at times, at war with the powers-that-be. The world of East Harlem in the 1970s, the world in which Tupac was raised, was not that far removed from the vision that Jesus offers for the end times. Read more: 2Pac – Keep Ya Head Up Lyrics | MetroLyrics We ain’t meant to survive, ’cause it’s a setup I blame my mother, for turnin’ my brother into a black baby They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poorĪnd the truth is, there ain’t no hope for the future You know it’s funny when it rains, it pours I try to keep my head up, and still keep from getting wetter It’s gonna take the man in me to conquer this insanity Last night my buddy lost his whole family I try and find my friends, but they’re blowin’ in the wind It’s hard to be legit and still pay your rentĪnd in the end it seems I’m headin’ for the pen While it is the chorus, which features a sample from The Five Stairsteps “O-o-h Child” that has been my earworm for the week, the verses actually have something to say about apocalyptic vision that Jesus offers the crowd in Sunday’s lesson.
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