Boston-based musician Oba Oseghali – better known as Ishan the Rapper – has an old-school spirit that harkens back to the earlier days of hip hop, albeit with a modern spin uniquely his own.
His rhythms are smooth with surprising background music and his lyrics complex, based on how he sees the world around him, sometimes similar to the controversial N.W.A., the Compton based gangster rap group that addressed important social issues through their work.
Ishan’s 2020 song “Justice” (check out the video here) features a calm rage as he recognizes black men and boys who were unjustly murdered, including George Floyd, who reminds him of his Nigerian immigrant father, and Trayvon Martin, who looked like his brother, imploring his listeners to understand how the families must feel in the wake of such tragedy, a word that seems so small compared to the appalling nature of each incident.
“I say black lives matter, you say all lives? But based on the way you treat a n***** that’s been all lies. … If my brother leaves and doesn’t make it home, I’ll set the world on fire,” he says, pointing out that until situational racism is properly addressed, the racial divide between white and black America will remain a deep, ugly chasm. “No justice, no peace,” he repeats in the song’s chilly refrain.
“You take our black communities, police them like its war/Got babies growing up, confused about what they’re hated for,” he continues, the video featuring simple shots of Ishan behind a fence or walking through a dimly-lit alleyway as dusk settles in, alongside power-packed shots of him with his face pressed against pavement.
He also addresses the painfully obvious lack of attention, in some ways indifference, paid to murdered black men and boys, in part by a media struggling to catch up as the numbers soar higher with each passing day.
“How many people have to die before you break the silence?” he implores.
Don’t tell me that we’re equal if I can’t take a jog,” a chilling reference to Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old black man killed while jogging through a Georgia neighborhood, hunted down by two men in a pickup truck and another man who followed in a car.
The song is a smart, painful social commentary, an important piece of art in a world where racially-charged issues – controversy over the removal of Confederate statues put into place not after the Civil War but during the Jim Crow era to intimidate, the higher numbers of black men in prison for simple crimes compared to white men – are just as raw as they were when the Greensboro Four refused to leave the whites only Woolworth’s lunch counter.
“Through my experience,” Ishan said in a 2021 interview with writer Hunter R. Berube, “I have witnessed too much racism to turn a blind eye to it, or act like it’s not there. I want to see it eradicated.”
He wrote “Justice” as a way to spur others to better understand what it is like growing up black in a predominantly white America, and how it feels to see so many black people die for no reason at all.
“I made that song because I wanted people to think of what the times were calling for,” he told Berube, “but I also made it because I was mad. I was mad to go on Twitter and see people dying.”
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