JID has been more than one of the most flow-proficient rappers in hip-hop since long before he was discovered by Dreamville. The Atlanta rapper has also always been a dynamic tour de conscious force, lyrically addressing the strife of society’s marginalized communities, and in particular detailing the struggles he has faced as a Black person in the American South – in the United States at large – since the onset of his career with singles and videos like he and EARTHGANG’s 2017 Mediate. With his new single, Skegee – a Black History Month anthem that, like Black history itself, is a cultural mosaic spanning much more than February – he’s black history in the making, detailing the shame in the United States’ past while putting on a clinic of cultural and educational dynamism with the simple tool of a single (and an accompanying music video).

The single itself ties his own experiences learning about the lopsided workings of the world, to the oft overlooked details of the not-so-distant past, and the all too present present. Most prominent in Skegee, JID divulges a memory of his youth speaking to a university in Tuskegee, Alabama where his dad opened his eyes to experiments performed on the black community there during the post-slavery sharecropping era. A microcosm of the black experience at large, the Tuskegee experiments, tied to his own experience allows JID to use the pain of his own struggles – the pain of black America – and the pedestal of his career as a cultural figurehead, to educate the masses, open eyes, and bob heads in one fell swoop. And that is an homage to the power not only of hip-hop music, but of his own brand of rap, that JID continues to furnish and further.