Malcolm X put a hex on my future, someone catch me
I'm falling victim to a revolutionary song,
One of the great black civil rights activists of the Civil Rights Movement was Malcolm X, a Muslim minister and human rights activist who hoped to spur within the black community independence, self-defense, intellectual freedom, and other tools to encourage the healthy development of a black culture and intellectual life.
Little known fact: While many of Malcolm’s detractors will decry his whole entire message with claims of racism, they will fail to recall that Malcolm X renounced his racism in his Letter From Mecca, inspired by the unity in Mecca and Arabia as a whole, despite the diversity among the worshiping Muslims.
However, the fact that it is a little known fact means that Malcolm’s legacy is often colored (no pun intended) with a tinge of racism that rarely gets out. Such a stain rarely washes out despite evidence and if one were to claim Malcolm X as a hero, that stain would be smeared on their own person.
Furthermore, Malcolm X’s distorted stance on self-defense has had both positive and negative effects on Kendrick’s intellectual growth, one which Kendrick may be too caught up in to realize what is truth, distortion, lies, and thus the plea for someone to catch him.
Malcolm X, like most revolutionaries, has about him an air of corruption and deviance (usually established after the fact) and so Kendrick could be commenting on how he is “drinking the Kool-Aid”, failing to properly understand the women/men behind the revolutionary song and instead falling for them because they sing beautiful rhetoric and honeyed words, thus the “revolutionary song”.
Lastly, most revolutionaries (Malcolm X was no exception) are dead men from the second their dissidence begins. That is the point of a revolutionary, not to simply speak up against evils and wrongs going on in their world but, as Huey P. Newton put it, to first learn:
A revolutionary must be ready to die for what they preach or share because the price for silence is death, death of their humanity for failing as a human being to speak out against evils they see going on. It is much like the revolutionary that Kendrick sees himself hexed, he comes from a violent situation which he feels he must speak on and dissect through his music but at the same time is not as divorced from it as an objective analyst would be. He can still be killed any day but that’s the point, because if what he is doing is truly revolutionary then his death will be worth it even required and it is that which scares him.
Kendrick’s dad was also affiliated with a black power gang in Chicago, and his family moved to Compton in an attempt to escape this influence. So Malcolm X “hexed” Kendrick’s future by inspiring the movement that eventually landed him in Compton.
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