Rap music has been known to elevate the tongues of individuals involved in preaching its stanzas by turning them into merciless tongue twisting maniacs, spilling about 5 words per second and doling out a story in several lines, no matter how superficial or irrelevant the story could be. As stereotypical as rap could be, it still speaks volumes on different levels. And this song is on that level that passes a profound message across to the listener.
Slumerican Shitizen is the 14th song off Yelawolf’s 2011 album Radioactive (also known as Radioactive: Amazing and Mystifying Chemical Tricks) featuring Killer Mike, who I must say is a likable rapper to me.
Slumerican Shitizen is more or less like a political song, with hardcore rap and profane yet down-to-earth lyrics that portray the doings of an average citizen with little to nothing to his name. Yelawolf goes in the first person pretext, referring to himself as ‘the bitch society raped’, saying he’s ‘sick to the soul with hate’. In earlier parts of the first verse, Yelawolf goes about questioning people saying ‘What d’you mean I’m white trash? Grab my nuts and kick your poodle in the face’. Apparently this question was a result of his claim that he didn’t care about morals or environmental policies and stole a drink then threw the empty bottle into the gutter.
Yelawolf uses this song as a means to get the listener to visualize what bottom-tier people could be feeling and reacting to circumstances, not because they’re lazy to change anything but because hope for the brighter side has been lost. A good example of this is the lines beginning the second verse with him stating;
‘My body is covered in tattoos that are totally offensive.
If I did it I did it for life, no regrets you know that I meant it.’ Not only that, he also tries to describe the state in which such neighborhoods are left to crumble, with his line ‘That crack in the Chevy’s window been there for over 7 months’ stating how the car had been neglected and how certain suburbs on the bottom tier of the scale are neglected as well.
Killer Mike goes more political, asking why people who are arrested with little amounts of drugs trying to make ends meet end up having such long prison sentences. He goes on to tell of how after a prison sentence one’s mom could be dead and his baby grown, with his girlfriend who was ‘…tight in that thong, fat as a fuck and her body all gone.’ With her reallying on government rations because the stash left for her had finished and she wasn’t working, the ex-con comes home to find out he owes the government about $50,000 for the free lunches. He ends the verse with the question ‘Do you go legit, and never have shit. Or do you g’up and re’up and get you a brick?’
Over all the song is a deep whirlpool of messages that raise the right questions despite the rather wrong circumstances they are based on. And on the case of racism with regards to finances, Killer Mike ends the song with;
‘What you fuckers don’t understand is, this ain’t even about race. This is about who got it and who ain’t got it. So if I’m on the bottom, and you’re on the bottom, then we’re the same color. Dark fucking poor.’
And just to put it out there, Slumerican Shitizen is a play on American Citizen with Slum and Shit used.
