Music Mood Board: The Sound of Pained Black Voices Seeking Justice

In June, H.E.R. released this track in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's deaths at the hands of police brutality. The words powerfully reflect the all-too-real disheartenment rooted in social injustice.

• "Starting a war, screaming 'Peace' at the same time / All the corruption, injustice, the same crimes / Always a problem if we do or don't fight / And we die, we don't have the same right / What is a gun to a man that surrenders? / What's it gonna take for someone to defend her? / If we all agree that we're equal as people / Then why can't we see what is evil?"
• "Trying times all the time / Destruction of minds, bodies, and human rights / Stripped of bloodlines, whipped and confined / This is the American pride / It's justifying a genocide / Romanticizing the theft and bloodshed / That made America the land of the free / To take a black life, land of the free / To bring a gun to a peaceful fight for civil rights / You are desensitized to pulling triggers on innocent lives / Because that's how we got here in the first place / These wounds sink deeper than the bullet / Your entitled hands could ever reach / Generations and generations of pain, fear, and anxiety / Equality is walking without intuition / Saying the protector and the killer is wearing the same uniform."

Simone wrote this song in 1963 after four Black children were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, AL — a horrendous act akin to convicted murderer Dylann Roof unrepentantly killing nine people at a predominantly Black church in Charleston, SC, in 2015. Nearly 60 years after Simone penned and performed "Mississippi Godd*m," her words still resonate with the anxieties that Black Americans feel every day.

• "Hound dogs on my trail / School children sitting in jail / Black cat cross my path / I think every day's gonna be my last / Lord have mercy on this land of mine / We all gonna get it in due time."
• "Picket lines, school boycotts / They try to say it's a communist plot / All I want is equality / For my sister, my brother, my people, and me / Yes, you lied to me all these years / You told me to wash and clean my ears / And talk real fine just like a lady / And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie / Oh but this whole country is full of lies / You're all gonna die and die like flies."

Smith created this song with cowriter and producer Ezrah Roberts-Grey after attending a social-justice demonstration. "The inspiration behind 'By Any Means' really came from going to the Black Lives Matter protest and leaving thinking, 'What can I do to keep this conversation going?'" she said in a statement. "It's not just a post on social media, it's life." The track will be a part of Roc Nation's upcoming protest-song compilation project titled Reprise, which will benefit The Gathering for Justice, the NACDL Foundation for Criminal Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project.

• "Too much time tryna figure out why / Too much time to be patient
  All this time you be feeding us lies / Ain't no truth in your statements / Too much pain in these little white lies / You left here / All this time tryna figure out how / We still here / I take pride in the things that we've done / Side by side in the revolution / Won't stay silent for things that I love."
• "I've spent too many days in my head now / Did you think we would forget, how? / Too many destinies, too many sentences / Read now, read now / See all this pain in the headlines / But I have cried for the last time / But know what happens, see / You would be blind if it was just an eye for an eye."

Holiday's "Strange Fruit" became an emblematic protest anthem in the mid-1900s. The lyrics, which depict the lynchings of Black people, shook the country's ethos so strongly that it was named the song of the century by Time magazine in 1999. Sadly, Holiday's powerful track made her targeted by the government — specifically Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger, who was a known racist. Anslinger's persistent efforts to thwart Holiday's platform and career eventually led to her untimely death in 1959, but her indestructible legacy has continued to live on.

• "Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."
• "Pastoral scene of the gallant south / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth / Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh / Then the sudden smell of burning flesh."