"Along with many New Yorkers, Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def), who were performing together as Black Star, were appalled by Diallo’s death. A number of demonstrations erupted throughout the city in the ensuing weeks, including a march across the Brooklyn Bridge led by the Reverend Al Sharpton. But the rappers searched for other ways to protest. Diallo’s death eventually served as the catalyst for Hip Hop for Respect, a four-song EP coordinated by Kweli and Bey that addressed the anger and fear bubbling in New York at the time. “I was inspired by artists who were directly involved in actions through music and beyond music that spoke to the need of the community,” Kweli says today. “I just thought that that’s what you’re supposed to be doing."...
“Back then, kids would hang out in the Village on West 4th Street and Washington Square Park. When Giuliani came into office, it immediately changed everything,” the rapper Jean Grae remembers. “There were cops on horses like, ‘You have to break this up. You are loitering. You can’t stand on this corner.’ It became us against them. It absolutely changed the navigation of what some of us as artists chose to start writing about.”
The death of Amadou Diallo spurred Kweli and Bey into action. Inspired by projects such as 1989’s “Self Destruction” and 1990’s “We’re All in the Same Gang,” Kweli, Bey, and the late Rawkus publicist Devin Roberson proposed the idea for Hip Hop for Respect: an all-star collaboration EP protesting police brutality, with the proceeds going to charity...
but the response was “tepid,” in Kweli’s words. “One Four Love, Pt. 1” never cracked commercial radio and the video received little airplay from BET or MTV. It was a hard lesson for Kweli...
last summer, after the shooting of Michael Brown and the resulting unrest in Ferguson, Kweli never considered another protest anthem.
“Music is free at this point,” he says. “Game did a song for Ferguson. He had every popular hip-hop artist on it. It’s a great song. No one gave a fuck. It was posted on a couple of blogs for a few hours until there was another story.”
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