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On the second floor of an apartment building overlooking 5th Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, YG and Nipsey Hussle’s 2016 single “FDT (F – Donald Trump)” was on loop all Saturday afternoon. once news broke that Joe Biden had won the presidency.
“I’m about to shoot Black Panther / Don’t let Donald Trump win, that n— cancer,” YG banged over the speakers, which were turned toward the street as hundreds of people danced and sang in. low. From inside the building, a young black man in the apartment raised his fist in solidarity with the jubilant crowd below. He unfolded a banner and hung it in his window. “Goodbye Donald, kiss that hairy ass.”
If you took to the streets of Los Angeles to celebrate Saturday, wherever there were revelers, there was “FDT”. YG and the late Hussle, born and raised in Compton and Crenshaw respectively, rang a teenage girl’s phone as she walked with her grandmother to a spontaneous celebration outside Town Hall. It has spread half a dozen car windows at a time along the streetwear neighborhood of Fairfax. He collided with Echo Park as a loud crowd poured into Sunset Boulevard to dance with new hope.
On election night four years earlier, “FDT” was a primitive cry, a shot from young people, blacks, the heartbroken and those who had been bitterly reaffirmed about America as a result. of Trump’s election.
“The situation is [screwed] YG told The Times in 2016, just after Trump was elected. “We spoke up because no one else was speaking. That’s what rap is made for. Too many rappers keep saying [stuff] without substance. I told Nip that if we do this together, we need to talk about Trump and take it straight to the streets.
YG.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
But now, as the country changes course after four disorienting years, it felt seething.
“I feel like I can breathe again,” said Nateeyah Kahsai, 29, from Santa Barbara fresh off an election night shift as a poll observer in Clark County, Nevada, one of the main States that helped lock down the election for Biden.
She had volunteered with a small team of black compatriots, and she echoed images of the George Floyd protests by recounting what this moment meant to her. (And of course, as she did, a passing car played “FDT” near her outside Grand Central Market on Broadway.)
“We’ve had this knee on our neck for years,” she says. “It’s too late.”
YG, who has emerged as one of the faces of this summer’s protest movement alongside activists like Patrisse Cullors, was not immediately available for an interview on Saturday.
For many fans who played “FDT” out of contempt four years ago, his 2016 song became the go-to expression of joy and progress on Election Day, once the presidential race was finally over. triggered.
CNN accidentally broadcast a version full of profanity while watching ecstatic revelers on the streets of Atlanta; some Washington, DC, revelers played it so loud in front of the White House that Trump could probably hear it.
On Saturday, the song hit the top of the iTunes charts in the United States and increased its streams from Tuesday. The song went from 60,000 streams on Spotify on Monday to over 250,000 on Election Day, and Friday quadrupled its plays on Amazon Alexa, from 6,000 on Thursday to around 21,000 by mid-afternoon Friday.
A fan-led campaign to send him to the top of the Billboard charts has won approval from YG (“F – Donald since 2016,” he wrote in response to one). There is probably nowhere the rapper would rather be than in the city’s thousands of car radios, as they celebrate the end of the Trump presidency.
“I just felt like I was doing something I was supposed to be doing,” YG told The Times in September. “The streets are talking, these are things that are happening, these are the people you have killed. I represent the streets. So I have to be a part of it, you know?
For many, Saturday felt like a happy mirror to all the days of protest and grief that rocked America throughout the summer. “FDT” is now a little sad too, as Hussle’s murder in 2019 took away one of YG’s closest friends and collaborators. But it struck a festive tone on social media as the election tide swept over Los Angeles
“I know @nipseyhussle is going … krazy now!” he wrote on Twitter.
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