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"We Could Be Free" by Vic Mensa, American rapper Vic Mensa, Call for Unity, Chicago/Illinois, drug addiction, Human Relationships, Police violence against blacks, The Autobiography as told by Vic Mensa
Vic Mensa (foreground) from song video “We Could Be Free”
Photo Credit: Rolling Stone
In keeping with my end-of-year tradition, I feature a song on my Poetry Corner December 2018. During this year of growing division in the USA, the hip hop song “We Could Be Free” by Vic Mensa captured my attention. It’s the thirteenth track on Mensa’s first, full-length, studio album, The Autobiography, released on July 28, 2017.
An American rapper, singer, and songwriter, Vic Mensa was born Victor Kwesi Mensah on June 6, 1993, in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in the good part of the Hyde Park neighborhood within a sheltered home with two parents, both educators. His white American mother and Ghanaian father, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, wanted their son to go to college. But the young Vic dreamed of becoming a rock star.
With adolescence came exposure to the real world outside of Vic’s gated community. In “Memories on 47th Street,” the biracial Mensa raps of his loss of innocence and the beginning of his drug use.
At age 12 I learned the difference between white and black
Police pulled me off of my bike, I landed on my back
Back to reality, oops, a victim of gravity
Where they pull you down and keep you there
Dependin’ on how you keep your hair
“I started to realize that America and the world were categorizing me as being black and all the stigmas attached to that, which would take a lifetime to unpack,” Mensa says in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
Mensa concludes in “Memories on 47th Street:”
In a land of desperation we often turn to self-medication as a coping mechanism
Some make a living as hood pharmacists while some just inhale to remove them from hell
I watched from the window of a gated community until I grew old enough
There was no immunity from allure of the life
CD Cover: The Autobiography as Told by Vic Mensa
Photo Credit: Roc Nation
At sixteen years of age, Mensa and his jazz-musician, high school friends formed the indie-rock band, Kids These Days, achieving success on the local, open-mic circuit. After the group fell apart in 2013, Mensa rose to international fame as a solo rapper. But such early success led to what he calls a “vortex of abuse.”
In “Wings,” Mensa rages about his self-hatred, self-destructive behavior, and struggle to free himself from drug addiction.
I’d probably be a vegetable if not for medical attention
My self destructive habits have me itching like Tyrone Biggums
In the cyclone of my own addiction
The voices in my head keep talking, I don’t wanna listen
“You’ll never be good enough, nigga, you never was
Nobody fucking needs you, you should just jump off the bridge
You hurt everyone around you, you impossible to love
I don’t want you to live, I wish you were fucking dead
I wish you were never born, we would all be better for it
I don’t love you, I don’t like you…
When Billboard’s Megan Armstrong asked why he thought drugs were so prevalent as a coping mechanism, Mensa responded:
“Well, what other coping mechanism is presented to us? I have a lot of personal experience bouncing around between psychiatrists and therapists and being fed pills, while at the same time being told that if I don’t stop doing drugs, I’m gonna ruin my life. They act like what they’re giving us is not drugs. You can go into a psychiatrist sometimes and just feel that this person’s only role and their only desire is to write you a prescription, get a check and send you out the door.”
The featured song, “We Could Be Free,” reflects Mensa’s rebirth after years spent in Hell. The opening refrain sends a powerful message for love and unity during a period of growing division among Americans, one built on fear and hate of the other.
Refrain
We could be free
If we only knew we were slaves to the pains of each other
One thing I believe I can learn
To see my enemy as my brother
Then we could be free, truly
Then love could wash away all the sorrows
I’m not afraid to bleed
If it means, we’ll make a better today not tomorrow
When asked about the two opening verses (emphasis mine) during his radio interview on Breakfast Club Power, Mensa said:
“There’s a lot of people in pain and they’re dealing with it through opioids and other drugs. We’re also taking out our pain on other people. We’re being directed by the powers that be to look at our neighbors to the south, Mexico, across the ocean in the Middle East, and Muslims as the reason of our suffering. It’s a lie. I made that song to give a different vision for the future that’s not so hateful, because I feel that we’re so much more alike than we’re different…”
In the second stanza of “We Could Be Free,” Mensa questions the oppression of blacks in America that takes the lives of young black men.
I don’t wanna wait for the afterlife
I don’t wanna vigil by candle light
I don’t wanna be the new sacrifice
I don’t wanna turn into a poltergeist
Be a ghost at night full of broken dreams
Mama cryin’ at a open casket
Cold as ice in a suit, three piece
All dressed up for Sunday masses
Pastor say, “put faith in God”
But faith alone can’t make things right
Who the fuck is you to patronize
Somebody son who daddy died?
Why they flood Baton Rouge?
Why the city singing Alton’s blues?
Why, why, why, why?
[…]
Sometimes I wake up and I look up in the sky
Asking why I survived all the days that I could have died
Who am I in my place
To contemplate suicide?
In those times I try to remember
[Refrain]
Only love [can] make my enemy my brother, Mensa reminds us in the closing verse.
To get there, we have to see beyond the lies that separate us. When that day comes, we will indeed be set free—freed from the capitalist system that enslaves humankind.
To read the complete lyrics of the featured song and learn more about Vic Mensa and his work, go to my Poetry Corner December 2018.
Three Worlds One Vision 
That’s one of the best explanations of how young black people feel about being American that I have read. Thank you for sharing it.
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Thanks, John, and thanks for dropping by 🙂
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Great post, Rosaiiene. I wonder if opioid addiction will turn out to be the struggle that finally unites us all.
Really powerful lyrics!
XXOO
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Thanks, Claire, and glad that you dropped by 🙂
Could the opioid addiction unite us all? With our corporate-controlled government in collusion with Big Pharma, I doubt it. A far greater disaster is underway: planetary ecological collapse. That, I believe, would be the final testing ground of the human species to work as one for our survival.
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This is such a great post- I like how you’ve broken down his lyrics& interviews and used them to shed light on the oppressions of blacks in America. I think lyrics are a great insight into the world we live in and should be studied more.
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Thanks, Ash. I agree with you that lyrics, like poetry, should be studied more. Great songwriters with national and international fame, attuned to societal rumblings, do play an important role in fomenting change.
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This man is a sound philosopher
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And, Derrick, he was just 24 years old when he released his LP album last year. Our young people are on the front line. We of the older generations are refusing to listen to their call for help and for change.
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That is so sad, Rosaliene
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I love how he says that we are more alike than different. That stood out for me. Great post! His music is powerful and inspiring. I can relate to a lot of his struggles as a minority and a human being. Stigma, labelism, oppression, segregation, hypocrisy – systemic trauma – cripples, but love, unity, empathy, forgiveness, connection, and belonging heals and unites.
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Multinomial, I also love that he emphasizes our shared humanity. After centuries of mental conditioning in believing that all human beings are not created equally, it will take a global awakening for Mensa’s vision to be realized.
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That form of mental conditioning is the worst kind because it represents the belief that “nowhere is safe.” It’s no wonder that such survivors of systemic trauma turn to drugs to maladaptively cope, or turn to aggression to attempt to survive and fight back – or both.
When those with interpersonal traumas have been conditioned to believe that they are not created equally (in a different way), and then they experience the after-effects of that trauma when their symptoms are linked to additional polyvictimizations outside of those relationships, then their world does not feel safe either, though their betrayal trauma may differ.
Perhaps their trauma-based symptoms are the same, but the cognition behind their maladaptive behaviors may differ (I don’t know yet how, but it just seems different when I’ve spoken to different people with different types of traumatic experiences). My father was a WWII veteran, and he was considered white when he was alive. He abused his other children and wives in similar ways as he abused me, my sister, and my mother – all as after-effects of the war. However, with my mother, me, and my sister, the abuse differed because, when compared to our all-white half-siblings and mother-in-laws, we were minorities (my mother full-blooded Japanese, my sister and I half or “hapa” or “hafu”).
We had an added layer of trauma – one that was systemically based at the time: the betrayal trauma of being told that we’re bad because we were “Japs,” for which my father was conditioned by the war to believe so. My mother was pregnant with my sister when I was about two years old in North Carolina; she recently told me that she and I were not allowed to use a public restroom in the mid-70s because she was Japanese. I was picked on in school for being a “nip” in the 1980s, which reinforced exactly what I felt from my father. And, in a very benevolent way, I’m told that being part Asian makes me “sexy,” “exotic,” and “smart.” As a childhood sexual abuse survivor, military sexual trauma survivor, and rape survivor, the words “sexy” and “exotic” are conditioned triggers for me, whereby I believe that I’m not worth anything else but to be used like a sex slave, rag doll, penetrative dummy, etc. But the pressure of being smart in the midst conditioned me to believe that I failed when I didn’t achieve As, when I didn’t achieve proper social status, when I didn’t achieve proper work status (I worked since the age of 13). It’s a different kind of systemic trauma than what Mensa and others in the African American communities have faced, but the conditioning for minorities are similar – that we’re less than.
As women survivors, our voices are told we’re hysterical or overly emotional, because they sound different from men. And as women survivors, any amount of aggression would be considered stereotypically unladylike, which is why numerous criminology and criminal justice research have shown that women are often sanctioned/punished more harshly than men for similar crimes (which may be similar to non-offender female survivors who may have been diagnosed or misdiagnosed more “harshly” than men in such different institutions that still stigmatize, segregate, and tell you that you are unfit for society in some way – whether it be criminally or mentally unfit – or both).
Cultural sensitivity posits that the etiologies of systemic trauma are such that minorities may learn to adaptively cope in a world that still traumatizes them via real aggressions (e.g., hate crimes, hate speech, etc.) or subtle forms of microaggressions (e.g., benevolent sexism, benevolent racism, tokenism, etc.) – look up Columbia University’s professors Sue (forgot first name), who researches microaggressions, and Carter (forgot first name), who published a “major contribution” regarding “Race Based Traumatic Stress Injury.” As I learned or understood additional literature relating to those topics that Sue and Carter have published, cultural sensitivity and trauma-informed practices portend that understanding the etiology of trauma is important when helping survivors learn better coping skills in a world that is understandably frightening for them – in particular. Emotional social support and its encompassed forms empathy go a long way to help advocate for such individuals, validate their ongoing suffering (not just their past traumas absent justice), their ongoing feelings and realities of injustice (and inequality as a form of injustice), and their need for the same benefits, opportunities, and love that others have received.
That said, I’m not sure what you mean by “it will take a global awakening” because, as a survivor of polytraumatizations, I take that to mean another war, another aggressive attack, another behavior that appears similar to the behaviors we purport to be fighting against. When I took peace studies and learned that there are differences between aggressive platforms to achieve peace (e.g., Mandela) and non-aggressive platforms to achieve peace (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.), I tended to steer toward non-aggressive forms because I’ve known what aggressive war does to people like me or like my father or like my veteran fictive kin or my veteran half-brother or my then military brothers who committed sexual assaults on my person when I was supposed to be their sister in arms (I’m sure they were externalizing some internalized pain from their training and/or the war and/or their upbringing, which was nonetheless illegal and vile and a betrayal). Then again, I did learn in life how our needs for defending oneself or a nation are there sometimes, and that in such cases, war becomes a form of justice when a nation or nations is/are under attack. But who makes those decisions, and are those decisions necessarily the best courses of action for the threat(s) at hand? I’m scared of global awakenings that involve more trauma, pain, loss, and after-effects. We’ve had enough of that, and I think we need more love, understanding, and peace. Why do we hold this black-and-white thinking that it’s either war or no war, blue or red, conservative or democrat, binary racial issues (when there are a lot of mixed-race individuals in the world, or when there are a lot of other skin tones besides the achromatic black and white labels)? I’ve got a ton to say about these areas because I’ve spent the past 6 or more years reading about systemic traumas among different populations – both in my spare time and for college. What kind of divergent solutions are there to bring about this global awakening? What will it take for us to understand that we as a society have believed in certain stigmas for so long that our very conditioning has infiltrated bias into our cultural practices, psychosocial relations, statistical norms, and assessments of one another? What will it take to form a global apology, a global form of healing-based (restorative) justice, and a global form of therapeutic jurisprudence?
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“I’m not sure what you mean by “it will take a global awakening” because, as a survivor of polytraumatizations, I take that to mean another war, another aggressive attack, another behavior that appears similar to the behaviors we purport to be fighting against.”
~ By “global awakening,” I’m referring to an awakening of our cosmic consciousness, based on compassion for the other and an end to violence and war. I see no other way forward for ending our shared traumas and the survival of our species. An impossible dream? Perhaps.
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That is an awesome dream and awakening! I hope for that, too!
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Powerful message. Thanks darling for sharing.❤️
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And thanks for reading, Laleh 🙂
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My pleasure ❤️
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You’ve done it again, Rosaliene. You’ve found yet another inspirational artist, whose words speak to me. I was inspired enough to go to your poetry corner and then to a video of a Vic Mensa performance. Can’t say I care much for hip hop, but the lyrics are compelling.
I like Mensa’s juxtaposition of psychiatric drugs with street drugs. I think both address the same symptoms but do nothing to provide cures. I believe our arguably insane society leads to both types of drug dependence. Mensa’s antidote, to “see my enemy as my brother,” and the observation that we are “slaves to the pain of each other,” deserve to be shouted from the rooftops.
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Katharine, I’m also not a hip hop fan, but storyteller Mensa hooked me with the first two sentences. I also found the rhythm of the refrain harmonious and filled with emotional truth.
Mensa’s interview with Megan Armstrong on mental health, prescription drugs and hip hop reminded me of your article, “Drugs, Drugs, and More Drugs” where you make the same connections with the culpability of profit-making pharmaceutical companies. During that interivew, Mensa asks:
“I really start to ask, like, at what point and time do we start holding the manufacturers of Xanax accountable? The prescribers of Xanax and Percocet, at what point and time do the people that literally make these products in labs and mass produce them — when are these people criminals?”
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Rosaliene,
People like Mensa ask good questions about the pharmaceutical industry, but I believe the FDA needs to be held accountable. It, after all, is the government agency mandated with protecting the public, yet it has repeatedly worked in cahoots with the pharmaceutical (and the food) industry to distort perceptions and underplay (or overplay) risks associated with specific drugs and foods. Unlike pharma, the FDA is supposed to be a “public service” agency, supported by taxpayers and for their benefit.
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Cahoots must be a wonderful wonderland, so many rich and influential people live there!
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I agree, Katharine. I’ve just read the news about the latest report from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The anti-depressant drug, Xanax, was involved in more than 6,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016.
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When it comes to Big Pharma and the legal drug trade, no one has done more investigative work than Jon Rappoport.
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/exposed-nazi-roots-of-the-european-union/ This latest is just one article, but there are many on his blog that deal strictly with the FDA’s compliance and collusion with the largest drug manufacturers in the US. If someone wants to really know, that is.
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Rosaliene,
I hate Xanax. It is highly addictive, with a short half-life, so withdrawal can lead to more anxiety than the person had originally. Not only that, when a person becomes physically addicted, withdrawal can be fatal.
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So many ways to be made unhappy and, in trying to kill the pain, make oneself unhappier. Glad he found his way out. Perhaps he is leading some to a healthful exit from their unhappiness. A talented and thoughtful young man. Thanks for this, Rosaliene.
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Dr. Stein, Mensa was fortunate. He had loved ones who believed in him and supported him during his struggle to regain control over his life.
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Thanks for posting this, Rosaliene. It’s good to see a trend towards rap that is more political and less misogynistic.
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Dr. Bramhall, I know very little about the hip hop genre, so can’t say if this is a new trend.
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Reblogged this on Guyanese Online.
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Thanks for sharing, Cyril. Have a great week 🙂
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Pingback: “We Could Be Free” by American Rapper Vic Mensa
Thanks for the re-blog, GuyFrog 🙂
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An interesting post! Love brings on a different kind of Revolution!
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It sure does, Dwight!
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There’s something that feels archetypal about his journey. And he’s only begun. I’m encouraged by his growing awareness and hope in spite of all the challenges.
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I am, too, JoAnna. Hopefully, his growing awareness could be a positive influence with his young fans.
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We see a beautiful, compassionate soul emerging from a harsh, bitter environment. How penthouses do that?
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JoAnn, I’m not sure I understand your question.
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I’ve always known it, but in recent years I’ve come to see more clearly that the deck is very, very stacked against enormous numbers of people in the USA (and around the world). There is a lot of work to be done!
Neil S.
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There sure is, Neil.
By the way, thanks for cheering me up with your Santa post 🙂
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As a child of the 80’s, I grew up with hip-hop as a voice…sometimes a mentoring one…at others a cautionary tone. Music has always been a modern day people’s history where artists reflect on political, social and economic struggles that we all face together.
Great article!
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David, thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts 🙂
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