The most recent issue of concern in the international situation is also the internal affairs of our "neighbor" Afghanistan.
If you're not very concerned about this, you may not have heard a proper title like "Taliban," but in some rap songs, you may have already met it.
The most classic example is undoubtedly the beginning of Drake and Future's hot order "Jumpman" in 2015:
Halloween
halloween
Taliban, Taliban
Taliban
I'm gon' shoot you
I'm going to shoot you (also the song producer's watermark)
Many people may wonder why Drake sings lyrics, but the question is actually quite simple, because it is actually a tribute, in the language of the rap world, it is a "shout out", and this shout out is not someone else, it is another singer of "Jumpman", Future.
If you've been following my previous introductory article about Future label Freebandz, you should remember that my title is "Acheng Taliban Army Freebandz", and yes, Freebandz's nickname is Taliban Gang, which comes from its 2013 label collection F.B.G.: The Movie, which has a song directly called "Freeband Taliban".
F.B.G.: The Movie
The word Taliban first appeared in Future's song in "Stick Talk" of "DS2", followed by the "What a Time To Be Alive" album with Drake mentioned at the beginning, in addition to the beginning of the hit single "Jumpman" of the year, the word "Taliban" also appeared in the first song of the mix, "Digital Dash":
Taliban on these hoes
Give a Xan to these hoes
But here "Taliban" is a slang term for a strain of illegal plants, a usage that Migos also used, suggesting that Future did not unite the Taliban with its own team at the time.
Then there's the 2016 hit order "Wicked":
▶▶ Wicked MV Screen
Now I'm Taliban Gang status,
that's what's happenin'
Here Future has already identified the intention of "comparing his group to the Taliban mob", and many of Future's songs will appear, such as "Life Is Good", "F&N" and some songs in its "EVOL", but even if he mentions the Taliban, he is not a member of this Middle Eastern organization, so why does Future compare himself to the Taliban?
The answer is also obvious, one word is crazy, And Future wants to tell its enemies in this way that they are wild and crazy, almost like the Taliban (there should be self-detonation and no-taste memes here), but this is just a person, a metaphor, not a real thing.
《FUTURE》
《The Wizrd》
"She belongs on the street"
Future has always been able to hold on to this piece - Pluto, Future Hendrix and the recent popular "young king" on the Internet, the person design belongs to the person, but Future may have a little bit of drama, has been promoting its own label is also called "Taliban Gang".
Future's Taliban Gang necklace via massappeal
But given the inextricable relationship between American hip-hop culture and gang/gang culture, is it possible that the "Taliban Gang" mentioned in Future is really a gang?
You don't have to say, it really is.
According to DJ Booth, Clayton County in Atlanta is the second worst problem for gangsters in Atlanta, where two gangs controlled the streets of Clayton County around the 10s — Southside Mafia and Hit Squad.
Tattooed southern black hands all over the body
The two gangs are hostile forces, often fighting, and sometimes calling Hit Squad "Hit Squad Taliban" on the street.
Future's use of this word may carry some childhood memories, and maybe they were future idols before (after all, Future also mixed on the street), so Future will always use the Taliban to show off himself and his team' personalities.
The picture is made of foreign netizenS PS
However, not only Future, after digging deeper, I found that some other rappers in Acheng were also related to this so-called "Hit Squad Taliban", such as the leading Waka Flocka Flame, whose 2010 album Flockaveli was the foundation of trap music, without "Flockaveli" there would be no trap after that.
In Flockaveli, there is a cameo rapper who happens to be from Hit Squad Taliban, and Kebo Gotti, a guest singer of the song "Grove St. Party" and one of the members of Hit Squad, talks about his imprisonment and his thoughts on Waka's rise to fame, and the "Grove" in the song's title is about "Grove Street", the place where "Hit Squad" originated. The color in the song's MV is the lime green that symbolizes "Hit Squad Taliban".
But after Waka became famous, he never had any cooperation or even contact with this Kebo Gotti, he has left his previous life, and with the change of new and old things, "Hit Squad Taliban" has gradually disappeared from people's vision, I did not find the relevant pictures when looking for the article with pictures, even if I found, the gray estimate on it is a few centimeters thick.
Gangs in the United States have a very strong sense of color, and if Future or Waka are one of them, then some of their visual works must have a lime green symbolizing "Hit Squad Taliban", but the truth is that we have not seen this crazy green in their MV, which means that they have nothing to do with this Atlanta "Taliban Gang".
But there's an interesting vignette about real Taliban members.
We've talked about 56 Nights, the name of the mixtape, because after Future and his friend DJ Esco went to Dubai, Esco was locked up in a Dubai prison for 56 days because he was accidentally found to have illegal plants.
During these 56 days, Esco met a member of the Taliban in prison, who was accidentally captured because he waited too long while on a mission, and the CIA tortured him for many days, and after more than 40 days, he was still tight-lipped, the United States released him, and then somehow ran to the prison in Dubai.
The inmates here praised the organizer who would rather die than a rat, simply because he did not "whistleblow" (street deformities values are harmful).
After DJ Esco was released from prison, he first joined hands with Future, Metro, and Southside to make "56 Nights", and the root cause of this mixing tape was actually that Esco lost Future's hard disk after he went to prison, so that Future was crazy to make songs, and then there was this "56 Nights" with the memory of the times.
56 Nights
DS2
56 Nights is also a preview, or prototype, of future-famous albums, DS2, with the cover and part of the song in Arabic.
Future, DJ Esco and Metro Boomin at the launch of DS2
The man with the phone in the back was Travis Scott
Sometimes it just goes so far, because a trip to prison gave birth to a piece of music that led to the contemporary Trap King.
In addition to Future's songs, the word "Taliban" has also been used in some other rap songs, and here are some excerpts:
First of all, we must talk about Future's neighbor 21 Savage (Future from Kirkwood, also called Lil Mexico or Eastside Atlanta), who points out in the Atlanta documentary:
He enjoyed mentioning "Taliban" in the song, and in the song "Yessirskiii" with Lil Uzi Vert:
21 Al-Qaeda, I'm Taliban (Yeah)
In the unreleased song "Issa":
Issa Taliban, Alexander McQueen
21 We have all heard the story of Savage's early years of real guns on the street, and he said that he was really playing with his life, not playing with his mouth:
In the song "From The D to the A" by Tee Grizzley and Lil Yachty:
Gucci 'round my hair,
wrapped tight like I'm Taliban
Like I'm Taliban, how we drop shit (Begone)
The "Taliban" here refers only to the way Muslims wear headscarves, but to highlight his fierceness, Yachty uses the Taliban to describe himself.
In logic's song "Under Presure":
Me and my homies that know me blowing up like the Taliban
Blow up here is a pun, blow up refers to getting on fire and becoming famous, and the Taliban is an organization that often produces explosions (blow).
The Taliban in general rap are nothing more than a combination of blow and hairstyle, and few link what the Taliban do to themselves – except for some drill rappers.
Chicago rapper Clint Massey killed a taxi driver shortly after releasing the MV for the song "Taliban," which was nearly 10 million hits on YouTube.
The Taliban's photos (picture one) are compared to screenshots of some of the current American rap music videos
Glorifying violence has always been the content of drill music, and we can't agree with or understand the drill music and what these people do, and the aforementioned Chicago rapper who brought abstraction to life will spend the next thirty years in prison for first-degree murder.
Hip-hop culture has spread to every place in the world where there is light, even Afghanistan, which "seems to have been at war", but before mentioning the Rap music scene in Afghanistan, it is necessary to have a specific understanding of this country.
According to The B station UP master AnSen Yao, the current incident that caused the Taliban to seize power is because afghanistan has a loose management system, many tribes, and independent government, because it has been colonized by invaders from all directions, resulting in the country is actually a scattered sand, there is no real power, these days the Taliban has done a power grab action that affects the pulse of the people of the world once 20 years ago.
And the fundamentalist Taliban may have launched a coup d'état precisely because they had the idea of changing this chaos, to put it bluntly, they could not tolerate a culture and belief that was different from their own, which is also the behavior of the so-called "fundamentalists", and the more well-known one is the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddha - the cultural heritage of mankind has disappeared because of other human beings.
And with the exception of religious beliefs, under the Taliban, cultural production was routinely prohibited, let alone music— or singing music.
At the crossroads of art and religion, the Taliban chose to change the intersection to a one-way street
There was a time when listening to music was as secretive as drug trafficking in the United States, which was really "underground". When the Taliban were not yet in full power, Afghan rapper Ali ATH carefully worked on music production, with all his income coming from streaming platforms, but after the Taliban took power, he was worried about his career and whether he could stay in his hometown was a big question.
But nothing can prevent people from speaking out, and we spent some time describing the national situation in Afghanistan, and the Rappers in Afghanistan naturally do not stop speaking and fighting.
In Afghanistan, the status of women's groups and music is very similar
But even so, afghanistan still has many female rappers who have been vocalizing
"The stories you hear in Rap songs in Afghanistan are very much like the American raps of the '90s, with substance, the voices of people who have been neglected for a long time, the voices that people want to be heard. Rappers value and value the meaning of words more than any singer. Afghan music producer Nuristani said.
Afghan raps are still inspired by current social and political events, either critical of the current state of society or referring to their own personal experiences.
Ahmad Haqbin, 21, a lesser-known young rapper, said the beauty of hip-hop is that it has no boundaries and he can sing anything. A lot of Haqbin's music is about his personal experience as an Iranian refugee. He explains: "Through rap, I can criticize society from the inside and outside, and I think any way can help to reveal social problems."
The use of current events, situations and people adds a certain urgency to Afghan rap. Traditionally and culturally, poetry has been a powerful medium for afghan social commentary, and the country is known for producing some of the region's most prominent poets and writers. As a result, it is common for Afghan rap artists to portray themselves as contemporary poets.
Afghan rap is real and very politicized. The Afghan rap scene, based on the story of what really happened in Afghanistan, has become an unlikely, inclusive platform for social discourse; but no one knows where Afghan rap will go after the Taliban seize power.
I originally wanted to talk about the glorification of violence in rap, but I felt that if I did this, I would also become an accomplice to these nihilism, so in the end I presented the relationship between "rap" and "Taliban" in a multi-story way.
Don't stop expressing it with music, don't stop using language.
Article Author/Typography:
Mkuag