Let's Get Free
| Let's Get Free | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by dead prez | ||||
| Released | February 8, 2000 | |||
| Recorded | 1998–2000 | |||
| Genre |
Underground hip hop Political hip hop |
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| Length | 69:30 | |||
| Label | Loud, Columbia, Relativity | |||
| Producer |
dead prez Hedrush Lord Jamar Kanye West |
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| dead prez chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Chicago Sun-Times | |
| Entertainment Weekly | B |
| NME | 7/10 |
| Rolling Stone |  |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| The Source | 3.5/5 |
Let's Get Free is the debut studio album by hip-hop duo dead prez. It was released March 14, 2000 on Loud Records & Columbia Records, under distribution from Relativity Records.
Critically acclaimed upon its first release, Let's Get Free was called a "return to politically conscious rap" and, "the most politically conscious rap since Public Enemy"; the duo's messages also earned them favorable comparisons with Brand Nubian, The Coup, Def Jef and X-Clan. The album's lyrics, performed in front of sparse beats that many critics derided as a "dull musical backdrop" are startlingly direct, militant and confrontational. M-1 and stic.man excoriate the media, the music industry, politicians and poverty, and urge their target audience to study socialism and ideas of black power. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars and lauded its equation of "classrooms with jail cells, the projects with killing fields and everything from water to television with conduits for brainwashing by the system". The album art is a homage to the Tricontinental Conference promotional posters.
The record opens with a speech by Chairman Omali Yeshitela, of the InterNational Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement, describing a method of hunting which lures wolves to suicide, and makes the analogy to self-destruction fueled by crack in the black community.
The duo's radical pan-Africanism is established on the album's first rap, "I'm a African", which contains the lyric "I'm an African/Never was an African-American". The same song explains their musical stance as "somewhere between N.W.A and P.E.", referring to the two major hip-hop groups of late 1980s hip hop, West Coast's N.W.A, and East Coast's Public Enemy.
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