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Lil Baby The Bigger Picture Essay

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Nearly a month after George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin in one of the most publicized police brutality incidents in history, Lil Baby dropped his new song and music video “The Bigger Picture”. It went on to debut at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart and become Lil Baby’s highest charting single to date. The video revolves around Lil Baby joining a Black Lives Matter protest in Atlanta aimed at eliminating police brutality and holding officers accountable for their actions. Throughout the video, different types of clips and audios from news channels are shown which include images of looting, protestors being tear gassed, and other riots that occurred throughout the United States at the height of the BLM movement. Different shots …show more content…

By turning frustration about a social justice issue into a song with clever word play and other language tools, he can effectively reach and educate an audience that might not have done further research by themselves. According to an article, “Music Videos and Political Music” written by Ravi Rao, songs with a political agenda were widely popularized in the 2000’s and have been used ever since then. Songs are like poems and Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” can be compared to the likes of slam poetry. In the first verse Lil Baby says, “It’s too many mothers that’s grieving, They killing us for no reason, Been going on for too long to get even”. This graphic set of lyrics allows the viewer to dive deeper into why police brutality needs to be fixed. According to Genius, a website that allows different contributors to decipher what song lyrics mean and symbolize, Lil Baby was referring to various instances of police brutality where a black man who was victim to police brutality was so young, that his mother had to succeed him and grieve his loss. One popular instance of this was the senseless killing of Trayvon Martin. Around 4 seconds after Lil Baby says this line, a lady holding a sign appears on the screen. The sign reads “I’m too afraid to have kids because you keep killing my brothers and sisters” with the faces of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor on the sides. This sign represents a real fear in the black community and the graphicness of the lines helps to evoke a sense of empathy for black people who are being affected by this

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