Akon :: Locked Up
This song was everywhere summer 2004. I went and bought the CD because I love socially conscious music. This is a silly term, because what I mean to say is: I like music that reinforces my socialist-feminist-anti-racist worldview. With a beat you can dance to!
This song is off Akon’s first album, Trouble, which also includes the similar-sounding and even more socially conscious Ghetto. While both songs are awesome, I like Locked Up better because if you are going to address social issues previously addressed by Elvis, at least go with a different vibe. This is no Jailhouse Rock—this is a big thud beat and simple piano line. The killer is the cell doors slamming. Subtlety is for math rock and jazz. Additionally, if you stack Locked Up with Trouble Nobody you get a hip-hoppity primer on the criminal justice morass we’ve gotten ourselves into. To sum up: No more prisons.
Even Akon, a good Senegalese immigrant with a jazz musician father, fell into the gruesome double trap set by the Prison Industrial Complex and our top down culture of gangster capitalism. But do not fret! Sure, mostly they set poor people and dark people up with bracelets and parole and the convict label in neighborhoods with no jobs and there is 70% recidivism and no one feels any safer, but at least Akon got out. He wrote this awesome song in jail while serving time for car theft and is now a big famous star.
I was one of only three people in my whole school to be on both Honor Role and Effort Role in fifth grade. For me, sure, it’s a big deal, but why am I telling you? For the same reason Akon name his second album Konvicted. Sometimes it’s difficult to let little identity building experiences go, no matter how trivial they are in retrospect. Akon: it was a car theft conviction. 50 Cent was shot 89 times, and Suge Knight eats babies.
I’m just mean because I’m disappointed. Konvicted is as horrible as its title. If you have ears and left your home in 2007, you have heard the song Smack That, featuring Eminem—the hit song from an album of money-worshiping, lady-hating crap. Clearly, Akon is dedicated to exploring the whole two popular images America offers black men: thug or pimp. He also appears to like money a great deal.
I am sick of money and the power it has and the interests it serves, and I’m tired of watching late stage capitalism eat whole communities. I’m not alone, and while Akon has temporarily abandoned the honest vulnerability of those first songs, I have not abandoned my hope for Akon or the complete transformation of ourselves, society, and the world based on justice in the service of love. Akon, call me.
Locked Up (5.4MB MP3)
Akon (homepage)
did you know Akon’s got a thing for scissors? ….what!??!!?