This is a cross-post from Just Journalism’s blog The Wire.
Following the appearance of Jay-Z on Radio 4’s Today programme, where the veteran American rapper recommended hip-hop tracks for people who ‘didn’t get’ the musical genre, The Guardian’s Kieran Yates wrote an online article asking for similar recommendations.
Yates offered a few of her own favourites, but alongside The Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest, she ventured a more controversial candidate:
‘For current UK sounds, I’d go for the political punch of Lowkey’s Long Live Palestine.’
Lowkey’s ‘Long Live Palestine’ asserts that the profits from various global companies go directly to Israel, echoing conspiracy theories about international Jewish domination:
‘Every coin is a bullet, if you’re Marks and Spencer,
And when your sipping Coca-Cola,
That’s another pistol in the holster of them soulless soldiers,
You say you know about the Zionist lobby,
But you put money in their pocket when you’re buying their coffee,
Talking about revolution, sitting in Starbucks’
It claims that Israel is terrorist, genocidal state:
‘How many more children have to be annihilated
Israel is a terror state, they’re terrorists that terrorise,
I testify, my television televised them telling lies,
This is not a war, it is systematic genocide’
And it states that:
‘Nothing is more anti-Semitic than Zionism.’
