Pink Siifu - album NEGRO song we need mo color 2020

It may be a stretch to call Pink Siifu's NEGRO "prescient", but the record, which dropped two months before the inflammatory summer of protest, feels almost bound to soundtrack the revolution. Lines like "tell the police he can eat a dick" from "SMD" shows Pink Siifu echoing a tradition of artists like N.W.A, whose notorious "Fuck Tha Police" shaped a generation thirty years prior. Indeed, history repeats itself: cops kill black people. America systemically oppresses black people. NEGRO makes it abundantly clear that Pink Siifu, along with so many others, is fucking fuming. NEGRO expresses this anger as a collage of almost unbearable noise. Pink Siifu delivers endlessly-quotable declarations and near-indecipherable verses over lo-fi beats that merge industrial music, hip-hop, and hardcore punk — each significant anti-establishment traditions. The album is punctuated by news clips, Blaxploitation film bytes, crushing distortion, jazzy flourishes, and occasional quietude. Its force simply cannot be reduced to individual tracks—20 in its < 40-minute runtime. In NEGRO resides powerful dissonance—there's a philosophy to its brashness, complexity to its simplicity, and loving to its venom. Turned off by the album's sound? That's the point. You're not supposed to be comfortable in 2020. NEGRO speaks to a cultural moment characterized by hatred and fear, feelings that will forever boil over until Black trauma has been healed. And those who experience it know painfully well the magnitude of the work ahead—for anti-Blackness is woven into the very fabric of our nation's flag. -- Andrew Cox