On Feb. 8, 2000, dead prez dropped their debut album, Let's Get Free. An urgent rallying call to Black folks across the Diaspora, the album was celebratory, cautionary, and demanding at once, and immediately established M1 and stic.man as dynamic voices in Hip-Hop.
Led by the instantly recognizable, brazen single, "Hip-Hop," with its deep distorted synths that immediately inspire thoughts of revolution, or at the very least, strenuous head-bobbing, stic and M1 were like a rush of fresh air. Refreshing, raw, and earnest in their delivery and perspective, they get right to it from the jump, weaving pan-Africanist ideologies with themes of Black liberation cultivated by Black thought leaders like Marcus Garvey, Robert F. Williams, Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, and others.
"If you a liar-liar, pants on fire, wolf-crier agent with a wire/I'm gonna know it when I play it," M-1, warns on the electric first verse. On the second verse, stic asks the question that's still relevant decades after his death and more than 20 years after the song's release: "Who shot Biggie Smalls? If we don't get them, they gon' get us all/I'm down for running up on them crackers in their city hall..." By the end of the verse, his question is simple: "You would rather have a Lexus or justice?/A dream or some substance?/A Bimmer, a necklace, or freedom?"