Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A Hispanic guy, a Black guy and a white guy walk into a room and decide to collectively write and record a socially aware and brutally honest hip-hop song in reaction to the ongoing police brutality against Black Americans. Then they create an equally barbaric music video to accompany it.
No?
That’s not exactly how the project came to be conceived, but it’s exactly what three forthright local artists did—and the end results are pretty staggering.
Following the shock and horror the nation felt after bearing witness to the slow, agonizing death May 25 death of Black Minnesotan George Floyd, local rapper Rashad Harrell (better known simply as Shadcore) felt like he had to put his anger and his frustration to music.
A longtime collaborator, producer and friend, Troy Cedeño, is currently putting the finishing touches on a new Shadcore album, Frisson, and pair felt that the time was right for them to wring out every ounce of compassion, anguish and exasperation and pour it into a new song: “Knee Off My Neck.”
Making a conscious effort to not sugarcoat or tiptoe around the message, the emcee and the studio virtuoso concocted as politically-charged a recording as anything hip-hop pioneers Public Enemy or N.W.A. ever did.
The song leaves little to the imagination; it was borne out of the exhaustion of having to live in a country where the value of a Black lives is less than a white one or one that wears a blue shirt.
“I just wanted to kind of express the Black man's reaction to what we saw and to what we've been facing for years and years on end,” Shadcore told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
“I just kind of wanted to be heard. I feel like we say, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and we say, ‘Hey, we get treated differently,’ but a lot of times you feel like those pleas fall on deaf ears. This is our reality; we are guilty by association because of the color of our skin. We want to be heard. Stop treating us like this. The song is a metaphor to get your knee off my neck. Stop holding us back and trying to stop us from being great.”
The 44-year old Black rapper has been recording since the early-90s and has never delved into such stark, sensitive subject matter, but the time was right. Cedeño leaned heavily on Shadcore to uncover the layers and get to the gritty, unattractive heart of the matter.
“I wanted to communicate the urgency of the situation in the anger and the rage that’s felt by millions of people of color. [Shadcore] wanted to do something that was a little bit softer about healing,” Cedeño, who runs C-Lab recording studio, recalled. “But I was angry. Then more and more protests were happening, and he started seeing what was happening on TV. He texted me and said ‘Screw that man. Go hard on this song.’”
The multi-talented Cuban born and bred producer, engineer, instrumentalist wrote and produced the track instrumental alongside Shadcore. The weight and the gravity of the message needed to be heard, and it was an easy process.
“[Shadcore] left me a voice message on what he thought the hook should be, so I took that and started crafting a song around that,” Cedeño explained, adding that Shadcore is usually a low, baritone bass, and smooth type of rapper. He doesn't really come across as angry, and he was softer on the first takes, so Cedeño pushed him, told him to get pissed off and channel his raw emotion. “I had to remind him of some of the injustices people underwent just to get him in that mindset and to get back in the booth and really get angry on the mic.”
Shadcore continually told CL that “enough is enough,” but he and Cedeño point out that the song is more than rage and fury; Shadcore ultimately wants people across the world, or at least the U.S., to just stop and listen.
“I'm hoping that it can tenderize the heart of all Americans to have compassion and fight for equal justice. Listen to the cry of the artist pouring his heart out, Shadcore said. When he was recording the verses, Shadcore wanted to channel the spirit of all victims of police brutality.
“People who lost their lives but also the spirit of our ancestors who were oppressed for so many years. I wanted to channel that period and kind of say collectively what they all would like to say which is, ‘Get your knee off our necks.’” Shadcore said. Cedeño agrees, and he’s equally as passionate about the sometimes gruesome, yet poignant, video his friend and Holy Terror bandmate Peter Nuffer made to accompany it.
“I hope it goes viral and I hope people just watch it. I'd love for it to change the minds of the people who don't know anything about the systemic racism and injustice that's inherent throughout this country,” Cedeño explained. “I hope they watch it, listen to the lyrics, and maybe change their minds or look a little bit more into it and actually soften their hearts to the plight of people of color.”
Admittedly, Nuffer, who by no means classifies himself as a professional video editor, had a gut-wrenching time wading through countless hours of violent footage to compile the montage of images and clips that make up the five-minute video.
“I was an agent of necessity,” Nuffer, who is white, confessed. “I think they were kind of under a time crunch and they wanted to get something out on video.”
The goal was for the finished, bold, gutsy clip to make its premiere on the anniversary of Juneteenth, the date which commemorates the true emancipation of the last slaves in America on June 19, 1865. Thanks to Nuffer’s sleepless nights, and his fiercely staunch loyalty to its purpose, the deadline was met.
“I was concerned, at first, that I wouldn't be able to find video evidence or documentation of all these things. I knew of these things and read about them as they occurred but, two hours into it, I had an hour and a half of raw footage of this stuff. There is no shortage of it,” Nuffer said of the process. “It went from kind of being excited about being able to help to being sick to my stomach from downloading all these things.”
Nuffer hadn’t yet heard the lyrics yet, just a rough take of the heavy, gruff, beats; he was apprehensive about a music video that contained so much gruesome and aggressive violence against Black people. The clips are heavy and very difficult to watch.
“Shad’s lyrics came in, and any concern I had over that went completely away because it's a rally cry. It’s a fight song,” Nuffer said, adding that the video needed to be uncomfortable and horrific. As a whole, it made for the hardest edit he’s ever done—he never wants to do a video like it again.
“It’s pure privilege saying that, right? ‘Oh, it's tough to edit the video,’” Nuffer said. “Try living that.”
Despite Shadcore’s newest full-length release being almost ready to drop, “Knee Off My Neck” will not appear on it. This was a one-off project, but he hopes it resonates and opens up conversations about racism and bigotry. It has to be talked about and confronted.
“We're at a point where you have to draw a line,” Shadcore lamented. “If you don't talk about it and pretend that it doesn't exist, you're complicit with the wrongdoing. So we have to stand up and make our voices be heard. We can't continue to go along and just act like this is not the reality that we live in.”
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This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2020.