An organization of kids downing tablets and ingesting lavatory water at the back of bars makes for uneasy, provocative imagery in the video for Camp America, the debut unmarried from Vic Mensa’s politically charged new mission dubbed 93PUNX. A track intended to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) debatable community of detention camps and their policy of setting apart youngsters from their dads and moms, it’s part of a new route for the rapper both lyrically and musically.
“There became one specific comment made using Matthew Albence that stimulated the track,” Mensa says from his label Roc Nation’s New York City headquarters of the modern-day deputy director of Ice. “He stated that immigrant detention centers were more like a summer camp than a prison. It became manifestly an incredibly disrespectful and offensive difference, but I also found it genuinely thrilling in a darkish way.”
With his creativity piqued and with an urge to talk out, Mensa began jotting down lyrics and took the concept of crafting a track about a summer season camp actually, proper down to the singalong chorus that brushes up towards brash verses, such as: “Take your garments off toddler, allow me to see what you obtain / We may have a great time in case you’re prison or no longer / It’s an ignorant, arrogant, terrorist, heritage / You can ultimately be an American.”
Explains Mensa: “Thinking about the artists I’ve cherished through the years, my favorites are the ones who’ve made a track with cultural, societal, and political significance. The Clash is my favorite band; their songs, like Rock and Casbah, are political and dance tracks. I like song and artwork with a measurement you could appreciate on exceptional degrees.”
Fans of Mensa won’t be amazed to see him use his accelerated preference to make a song with a delivered measurement, given his specific worldview, built based on growing up in Chicago and spending adolescence on the city’s South Side, a reality he likened to residing in a dual global.
“I got here from a -determined household, and my father is a Ph.D. from West Africa, but at the same time, I grew up five blocks from wherein Obama lived and five blocks from the tasks,” he says of having a front-row seat to social injustice while also gaining an appreciation for his lucky state of affairs. “The disparity among the haves and have-nots changed into usually blatantly obvious to me, and that genuine gap drove me to begin writing and pick out a pen. I desired to explain and recognize the world around me as it becomes easy to see it turned into corrupted.”
With that in mind, Mensa started building a career. The electricity of his 2013 mixtape Inanetape (which additionally featured close buddy and fellow hip-hop social activist Chance the Rapper) landed him on the quilt of XXL magazine’s Freshman Class in 2014, and he signed an address Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. Along the way, he’s helped pen tracks for Kanye West (his Wolves scored a Grammy nomination for nice rap music in 2014) at the same time as Mensa’s debut album, 2017’s The Autobiography, cemented his reputation as a hip-hop pressure. But despite his achievement within the genre, Mensa is short of pointing out that he became a rock fan before he developed an appreciation for rap.
He becomes maximum considering acts like the Clash above and the Cranberries, releasing a cowl of Zombie on the anniversary of lead singer Dolores O’Riordan’s death this past January. “Some of the most punk human beings in my thoughts are Nick Cave doing piano ballads or Lou Reed. He wasn’t the loudest, but he changed into making a song about transgender people in Walk at the Wild Side. It’s a spirit of rebellion, anti-status quo, and counterculture.”
Taking its moniker from a garb line of the identical call and the usage of Pharrell Williams’ band NERD as a template, 93PUNX (the ninety-three derived from Mensa’s delivery year) turned into the appropriate car to channel his frustration regarding the present-day political climate. “It felt to me like a possibility to use the song as an observation at the ills of society and as a way to say ‘fuck you’ to the oppressors,” says Mensa. “It changed into a distinct creative method for me, unlike doing rap tunes, where I’d listen to beat repeatedly and write on top of it. With lots of these 93PUNX songs, I’d sit down with a concept in mind and discern a way to convey the message in that concept.”
When Camp America was launched in advance this month, it obtained immediate blowback from conservative information shops like Breitbart, attacking Mensa for the video wherein he stars as an Ice agent. One article (headline: Rapper Vic Mensa Puts White Kids in Cages in ‘Camp America’ Video) garnered over 1,300 comments, inclusive of one calling Mensa “a tattooed racist thug” and many others sharing that sentiment.
“I think that we get so desensitized to egregious human rights offenses nowadays because of the appearance of social media, global interconnectivity, and instant gratification of the net,” Mensa says of his overarching goal of the video and song. “Seeing such a lot of pix of immigrants detained and being handled like criminals and kids with emergency tinfoil blankets dozing at the floor in the back of chain-link fences, human beings neglect how fucked up its miles. [I’m talking] particularly about those who assist those who push those policies of family separation via.”
