Oscar #Worldpeace Has No Time for Your White God
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Music

Oscar #Worldpeace Has No Time for Your White God

The London rapper-producer isn't holding back on tackling police brutality, white supremacy and black pride on his upcoming EP, 'IC3.'

When rapper and producer Oscar #Worldpeace’s grandma heard he was writing a song about black pride and white supremacy, she got worried. Picking up her phone, she texted her daughter – Oscar’s London-born, Jamaican mother – basically saying ‘talk to him about it.’ He’s recounting the story to me now, laughing gently, in a cafe in his north London neighbourhood of Tottenham. The song in question is his most recent single, “No White God,” a searing take on the realities of blackness in overwhelmingly white spaces, delivered over a beat designed to make the loose flesh on your body quiver.

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But no one likes to scare their nan, so Oscar had to explain to his mum how “the openness of the internet means we can do and say what we want,” he begins. “But she lived in a whole other generation. Mum was like, ‘wait until you get bigger, before you put that message out. Wait, you never know…’ But I said, ‘mum, there’s no time. We’re all going to go one day, so there might not be a chance to wait.’” He chuckles, then pauses. “I might not feel that way in five years but I feel like that today. Now the black experience, and how beautiful it is to be black, is so important,” and once he’d played her the track, she saw his point.

One listen to “No White God” might take you on a similar journey. The track, which he wrote and produced almost a year to the day before we meet in late April, is bold and unafraid – I’d go so far as to call it uncensored. It’s one of those songs that pairs a catchy hook with a resonant and conscious message, almost wrapping its political heft in an invisibility cloak of blast-it-in-the-car bass. As we talk – Oscar politely covering his mouth while chewing his chicken wrap – he looks at ease with that. The song comes off his upcoming IC3 EP – “IC3” being the UK police’s code for black men. Or, in their own words back in the 70s, for men of “Negroid types – Caribbean, West Indian, African, Nigerian.” Oscar turns the crass acronym on its head with this EP, and so on this song in particular – the video for which we’re premiering – he focuses on celebrating blackness. Specifically, “No White God” zeroes in on the power you can find in yourself when you stop subscribing to Eurocentric beauty standards or cultural markers at the expense of your own heritage.

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The track came together quickly. “I didn’t want to just write about the same things; I always want to evolve. So I started to listening to more reggae, to more old-school African music – people like Ebo Taylor.” Then he came across a track by one of his favourite reggae artists Sizzla, called ‘No White God’.” As a Sizzla fan, Oscar was surprised he’d not heard it before. “As soon as I heard it I was like, ‘WHAT?? This is what I wanna do. I want that feeling’ – I felt empowered. So I listened to it for a whole week, then turned on my laptop to freestyle the chorus and made the beat after that.” It all took about half an hour – ”it came pouring out of me” – and left him feeling the most empowered a song ever had. “And now I feel like all music should give you that feeling.”

In the Taz Tron Delix-directed video, you see black women – a dancer, a young woman giving birth, another holding a baby – softly lit and several moving in slow motion. Oscar pops up, to rap lines like the chorus hook: “No white god, oh my gosh / Lift up blacks, til my shape’s tip-top / I’m as dark as night time, so it’s no nights off,” drifting in front of the lens in a dreamlike state. The white people in the video play cops, gussied up in their riot gear and pointing guns in the faces of dancing black women. Lyrically, Oscar reference the deaths of mixed-race Londoner Mark Duggan – “Who killed Mark? Was it all-white cops?” – and black reggae musician Smiley Culture – “Who killed Culture? White men in suits?” Both men died in 2011 after coming into contact with Metropolitan police officers. A jury decided Duggan’s death was a “lawful killing,” three years after police officers shot him on the side of the road during a traffic stop, and a jury ruled that Culture had stabbed himself when the police were in his home.

After Duggan’s case in particular, who the British press painted as a dangerous gangster when we wasn’t alive to defend himself, Oscar remembers thinking “‘why are we approaching a man like that?’ The things that people were saying, like he has a gun and all that, makes me think that are so many other ways to approach human beings. That hurts me as well, because that could happen to me. To my brother. And that would break me entirely.” Rather than lose himself in worry about what could happen, he’s resolved to make music that he believes can uplift other black people.

It seemed that some in the industry weren’t as keen, though. “When we were sending out the audio for ‘No White God’ – and I don’t wanna get into this too much – I noticed that no black DJs were playing it. A lot of white DJs had played it, and I’m so grateful that they did. But when I started getting feedback that some black DJs had heard it and didn’t want to play it, I thought, ‘how could you not want to? I did it for you. I made it for you, for us.’ For my people to turn around and say they don’t get it or don’t want to play it, that hurts.” Subconsciously, that may contribute to how much Oscar’s also directing his message of self-love towards the younger generation.

In the video, for example, his 13-year-old brother (“he’s making beats; he’s going to take over my legacy”) and a girl actor are both crowned, in a vignette that looks like a regal, family portrait humming with a warm, orange glow. People their age are the ones he hopes get into this song’s message, because, as he says “there’s nothing to be scared of! If you wanna play gun music, that’s fine with me. But give these kids another narrative, another way. Let them have a choice. I don’t want to put anyone down, but rather than making the same old materialistic rubbish, we should be empowering our people.” Oh, and if you were wondering – his gran loves the song now.

You can find Tshepo on Twitter .