Im Destined to live the Dream for all my Peeps who never Made it

The song this line comes from is Nas’ verse in the song titled “Life’s a Bitch”. It is a weeping and a wailing type of song; the type Jay Z spoke of when he said, “I can’t see it coming down my eyes, so I gotta make the song cry”.  The song sums up the dangers of living in the city, living just enough for the city, and the reality that we are all gonna die (some are resting in peace and some are sitting in San Quentin, others such as myself are trying to carry on tradition).The dice rolls and one never knows how the card they were dealt will play out. I study astrology somewhat, and my teachers will tell me that everything is written in the stars, and while that may be true, I feel man can misread the cues and mishandle the moods of the time and perhaps there are many paths that a soul could take depending how they stick and move. It’s a tough song to hear as a late teen twenty something year old Black child in America, who at that age lost friends or someone in their age group to police, street violence and by High School AIDS. We watched people mess up school and end up on the street and get kicked out their house for wilding and end up selling drugs, sex, or both.  You know that odds are not stacked in your favor and so for many of my generation and I see somewhat this generation people turn to weed specifically to help numb the pain.  Get high and get faded and all this trouble will pass by or will at least be palatable for me to get up and do it all again tomorrow ad infinitum.

The rapper AZ, who raps with Nas on this song, took his name from a Harlem street hustling legend (AZ, Alpo, and Rich Porter) mythologized by the rap group Mobstyle and in the movie Paid in Full. Both rappers and hustlers dreamed of, envisioned and worked for a life of extravagance that was beyond their physical realities. Hip Hop articulates that longing. Soul force is what it sounds like. It’s the power within ones soul that is made manifest in all creations of the soul, music being one of the most notable ones, art, construction, food, being some others.  Soul force is the power of those creations to move others in and on a spiritual, physical, and emotional/mental level.

A song, a line, a note, will touch your soul. It will touch a place that makes you sway, smile, close your eyes and nod, any one or all.  Even cry, especially when it makes you cry. I live for the moment I see a painting or eat something so good I tear up, that that ish right there. In this song, in that line there is some soul force and circle of life ancestral knowledge. Recognizing that we are all connected, the dead, the living the unborn, we are not dumb amoral children.

Historically, African Americans are mostly raised in churches or by spiritual salt of the earth people who stress family, always urging you to call this aunt, uncle, cousin, introducing you to new cousins almost yearly. Friends become family and for many the bonds of family are ties that never break, for better or worse.  When people are alive, we often live our lives for them, going to college instead of pursuing music for older relatives, selling drugs to buy food because relatives are not, joining the same gang, worshipping at the same church with rigid continuity.  Those kinds of connections do not die when the people do. We name children after deceased relatives, we pour out liquor for them, and we on some level, some of us, try to live the type of lives they would be proud of us for….again for better or worse.

Cuz, I’m destined to live the dream for all my peeps who never made it. When you put that in a larger greater context of people classified as Black of African descent in North America, then you have the stories of Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Mandela, Mansa Musa.  Who knows the dreams and the visions the pharaohs had of North Africa, Egypt the “Gift of the Nile”? What shores and peoples did Mansa Musa think he would find when he sent over 2000 ships from the West African kingdom of Mali? Where did those ships end up anyway? When you fast forward that story from glory to gory plantations, memories of children taken, men broken and women wailing, the dreams of those who didn’t make it has greater feeling.  Do you feel like dreaming a little bigger? Working a bit harder toward a dream?

Initially when I was young and I heard it, yeah I liked the part that says fuck it all, “that’s why you get high, cause you never know when you’re gonna go”, young and carefree and a part of that is a problem, another part of that is the liberation.  You are going to die; we all know this, then why not live in pursuit of ridiculous dreams, pushing beyond for those who didn’t make it, coloring in an outlined dream with vibrant reality?

Peace and love from Soul Force worker #1 Lola Fulani