The Message

Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge
I'm trying not to lose my head.
It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me
wonder
How I keep from going under.

From "The Message" (Sugar Hill Records)

Every summer there seems to be one song that dominates the atmosphere in our mostly black, low-income neighborhood. You hear it drifting out of apartment windows, booming over street-corner gatherings, and blasting from a tape deck on the bus. Usually it is some high-spirited chant about the pleasures of love, dancing, or general good times. But in this second year of the Age of Reagan, good times are getting harder to come by, even in popular song.

This summer the song that held sway over the inner-city streets was "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. "The Message" is done in the current "rap" style, which consists of couplets recited in a sing-song voice over a rock-steady funk instrumental backing. It is a style that originated among the street kids of the urban ghettos. With "The Message," rap comes home with a vengeance as the young men of the Furious Five run down the cold-blooded horrors of ghetto life with a desperation that is made even more fearsome by its lack of hyperbole.

With the refrain quoted above, "The Message" is perhaps the most appropriate anthem possible for inner-city black Americans who must be feeling especially "close to the edge" this year. The song describes a world of rats and broken glass--where young women arrive in the city and drift into the waiting clutches of pimps, where old people try to escape into the world of soap operas, and where those whose minds have cracked under the strain end up on the street "eating out of garbage pails." It is a world in which heroin addiction and crime are epidemic, and the noise, the smell, and the constant fear make everybody feel that they are about to go under. In short, "The Message" says what life is like every day for millions of people who have been penned up, discarded, and forgotten "in this land of milk and honey."

This summer, while "The Message" was playing all over the streets of black Washington, official Washington was (between wars) engaged in a debate over this year's federal budget, which will include still more cuts in the social welfare programs that many of our neighbors are forced to depend on for their survival. And each month this summer was marked by the announcement of a new record-breaking unemployment rate. It seems that "The Message" is not being heard across town. The radio stations there won't play it, and the people who live there never have to see the world that it comes from.

The last verse of "The Message" is a mini-biography of one young man born into the ghetto. It is the heart of the song. As it continues, the singer's voice intensifies, and the urgency that had been just below the surface of his delivery comes raging to the forefront.

You hear how a boy grows up admiring all the "pimps, pushers, and big moneymakers" in his neighborhood. Inevitably, he drops out of high school, can't find work, and drifts into the life of the street. Finally he gets nabbed for robbery and ends up sentenced to eight years in prison. In jail he spends two years being sexually abused by other inmates and tormented by guards, until one day he is "found hung dead in the cell" with his cold body swinging back and forth.

Every time I hear that last verse of "The Message," I think about the group of little boys on our block who hang out and play in front of our house much of the time. They are typical kids, often knocking at our door to ask for a band-aid for their latest scrape, or a drink of water, or help with their newest project, like the succession of go-carts they have built out of junk in the alley.

This summer their main project was their own funk band, called the Euclid Connection. Their band consists mostly of percussion instruments made from discarded containers, with a few toy horns and a toy electric organ thrown into the mix. Many evenings this summer they serenaded us and all passers-by from the sidewalk in front of our house.

Like all children everywhere they are capable of mischief, but basically they are as lovable a bunch of kids as you could meet. When I see them now I can't help remembering how high are the chances that at least one of them will have a life story like the one in the song.

Those kids are still too young to know that they may not have a future. But they will find out one day. And when they do, they will most likely either resign themselves to it and begin to die inside, or they will get mean and learn to do whatever it takes to grab a piece of whatever action is around. In either case, they will not be nice kids anymore.

"The Message" is that there is something terribly sick and evil about a social and economic system that will destroy children and that ultimately will destroy us all in one way or another.

For almost four hundred years, black people have been trying to get that message across to white America. They have prayed, sung, preached, organized, demonstrated, written books, and rebelled. But their most eloquent pleas and most righteous demands have fallen on deaf ears.

At one level "The Message" may be just another pop record with a good dance beat; but it is also the next generation of black men and women's version of the question Langston Hughes asked so long ago: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?" It's time that America heard The Message.

Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.