dead prez - Propaganda

"Terrorism on the rise, commercial airplanes falling out the skies like flies."

Album: Let's Get Free [debut album]
Genre: Hip Hop, Political Hip Hop
Album Release: February 8th 2000
Length: 5.13
Producer: Lord Jamar
Vocalist: M-1, Stic.Man & Becca Byram
Label: Loud Records

Official Audio

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 1.3 million
YouTube Music: Over 1.7 million

Credits

Sampled from Santa Esmerelda - You're My Everything (1979)

Details

• The producer Lord Jamar is a member of the hip hop crew Brand Nubian.
  
• The two rappers met while they were students at Florida A&M University.
  
• 'Propaganda' appears at the end of the album as a hidden track.
• Dead Prez is stylised as 'dead prez' with no capital letters. The band know you're supposed to capitalise a proper noun and make a deliberate choice not to. It's an act of rebellion which fits well with the groups image and conditions the listener into expecting the rules to be broken.
  
  
• This track in particular is even more politically charged than usual for dead prez and features references to historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln "you can't fool all of the people all of the time." The propaganda referenced in the title is the propaganda of the mass media which, from the point of view of the rappers, is controlling the masses through a systematic campaign of brain washing.
  
  The song was in a way prophetic as it features the line "terrorism on the rise, commercial airplanes falling out the skies like flies" when it was released a full 19 months before 9/11 when commercial airplanes were used as weapons and flown by terrorists into high-profile targets such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The end of the song features a speech by Huey Newton, who was a member of the Black Panthers, who were opposed to the American government. dead prez make a deliberate attempt at keeping the views of Huey Newton alive "they killed Huey cos they knew he had the answer".
  
  
  
  Lyrics