Good Ole Penitentiary Blues (Revised)

Erykah Badu's song "Penitentiary Blues" goes hand in hand with a presentation I did on Assata Shakur and her stance on the political implications and racist undertones of Black males and women accounting for a majority of the American prison population. In this song, Badu uses her aesthetic dimension to pursue this cause. She targets the everyday struggle of Black men and fights back with her words in saying, "Evil, don't test me/ Evil, you won't win." These words are powerful in their meaning and their implication that black men will eventually rise up and overcome the institutionalized slavery of the body and mind. The chorus of this song laments the fact that the world is seemingly out to get Badu, or any Black person in general. She asks "Oh, why world/ Do you want me to be so mad?" This question can be envisioned coming from countless African Americans as they struggle to grasp the purpose of their oppression as well as fighting to realize that they they don't deserve the unfair and unjust treatment they receive at the hands of those in power.

I appreciate the next stanza of this song. Badu exclaims "Since you ain't playing by the rules/ I'm 'bout to kick you off your stool." Here, she is expressing the thoughts of many by basically saying that they've tried to do the right thing, the best thing, but their best just ain't good enough. Instead, putting feet down is the only way to get what you want 'cause enough is enough. Further along she makes it a point to breach the topic of unity and togetherness, which becomes a greater problem as the years progress. A line that particularly struck me was "With the same look ya mama had." Picturing this song as a story, it is easy to imagine the continued failures of the African American community to rise up and obtain their own upward mobility as promised by the doctrines that founded this country.Though easy to imagine, this is not a concept easily accepted. "The same look ya mama had" shows that class and race struggles are generational, while every generation hopes for the next one to be better, the defeatist overtones suggest that today isn't the successful one.

In response to Angela Davis' piece on language, Badu, like Billie Holiday, rewrites the English language for her own purposes. "Black people did not embrace the spoken English language without fiercely challenging the cultural oppression it implied and without incorporating this challenge into their daily speech" (166). Here Badu not only challenges the language, reworking it to suit her needs, but also ironically uses it as a way to point out that prison life and jail are the only stable constants in a black male's life.