Full textual analysis- Sound of da Police (KRS-one)

Full textual analysis- Sound of da Police

KRS-One released the song Sound of da Police in 1993 and fall under the genre of political hip hop or conscious hip hop. The overall message behind the video is to bring awareness and to criticize police brutality and systematic oppression which forms the basis white privilege.

In the opening seconds of the song, you can hear a ‘whoop whoop’, this is instantly connoted with police and then is further reinforced by the lyrics ‘that’s the sound of da police’. Not long after that he personifies the police as a ‘beast’, these are creatures which are often associated with evil things and is more often or not used in pop culture to denote something as the bad counterpart to something good for example Beauty and the Beast wherein the beast is meant to be feared by children watching it. It could be said that this link drawn between the police and a ‘beast’ will be positively viewed by the black community in particular as they are the demographic which have dealt with police brutality throughout the year. However, that is not to say that a politically aware white person would not agree with this link made. Throughout the song the lyrics refer to white supremacy and colonisation, not directly but clearly enough for a person to understand the message behind the lyrics. For example,‘You can't stand where I stand, you can't walk where I walk’, is referring back to black and white segregation and how black people were treated. It is made quite obvious that black people still face this sort of discrimation even with civil rights laws passed, seen in the lyric 

‘You claim I'm sellin' crackBut you be doin' that’, which suggests that black people are often pinpointed as the criminals just because of their skin colour and society like to portray the white person as the victim or the innocent party.

Throughout the video they use red and blue lighting which is connoted with the police sirens. The highlight how the issue of police brutality is part of a black persons every days life and it is al around them, reflecting by the fact in the video the lighting and lyrics are about the police force. About 15 seconds into the video we see out first shot of an actual video of police aggression and then throughout the video we see loads of shot clips of police brutality against the black community. In one shot in the video we can see the rapper standing on the right side facing a police badge on the left. This suggests that he is aiming this directly at the police and he wants them to see it, it shows he is directly criticizing them with anguish and pain. In addition, a lot of the shot include him standing against a somewhat glaring white background. This could be read as him standing up to white authority over black people or it  could also suggest that the black community is innocent as white is often associated with purity and innocence.

A lot of the camera angle are low camera angles with him facing down to the camera or close up shot of his face. One reason for this could be that he is trying to portray himself as talking down to the police as they are the bad ones and often good towers over the bad in the end. On the other hand, this could be seen as him representing the black community as a whole and the close-up shots of his face mean that we can clearly see his facial expressions which show the anger, frustration and pain that he is trying to express to the world. There are also a lot of mid shot camera angles so that we can see his hand gestures as well as he uses them quite expressively. For example, he uses a lot of pointing motions with his hands like he is pointing his finger directly at the police in an accusing way, and he flares out his hands in a motion which looks like he is putting his hands out to the side as if to ask ‘why’ is this still going on and why is it happening. Lastly, there is a lot of used of a fish camera lens in which he puts his face up to the camera, this could be seen as him not being afraid of the consequences of the video that could arise and his will not back down as police brutality as affecting his family for years and he wants to stand up to it.