Music: has anything changed since Nego Drama?
Nego Drama is a rap song by the group Racionais, with tales about living and growing up poor in a Brazilian slum. My flatmate and I love it, and we always sing along. The only thing is: we have only been to a slum on holidays. Cuz you know, it is fun to be black if you’re not black. But that’s for another article. And the lyrics go like this:
Nego Drama, among success and mud, money, problems, envy, luxury, fame
Nego Drama, curly hair, dark skin, the wound, the sickness, in search of a cure
[…]
The trauma I carry so I’m not just another fucked up black
The drama of gaol and slum, grave, blood, siren, crying and candles
[…]
You must be thinking what do you have to do with any of it?
Since the beginning, for gold and silver
Just look at who dies and you’ll see who kills
The uniform that practices evil gets the merit
To see me poor, imprisoned or dead is just cultural
[…]
I didn’t read, I didn’t watch, I am Nego Drama, I live Nego Drama, I’m the product of Nego Drama
Hey Mrs Ana, no words, you’re a queen
[…]
The song, written in the ’90s, is basically a description of what life is like as a black man in a slum. His life IS drama. Not only his but of all the young black men out there. Back then, being a black man meant you either become a criminal or you’re dead. Very few escaped the cycle. Thirty years later we are still fighting the same fight. The biggest group of imprisoned people in Brazil is: guess what? Black, slum dwellers, young men.
As the group said, it is so common to see black young men dying every day we take it as common. We became desensitized. And that is very dangerous, it means the cycle will continue for many years more. He also raps about police brutality, a discussion that is still going on. The only difference is that now we have social media and photos to prove it does exist.
It seems like most people don’t care, as if nothing affected their lives, but it does. And I wonder when we are going to wake up and realise that killing and imprisoning these men is not normal.
At the end of the song, the group leader thanks his mother, Mrs Ana for being a queen. What that means is that she did her best to raise him and protect him, keep him away from all the temptations the environment has to offer, all of that with empty pockets.