🎶 Sound Is Spell: How Kendrick, Missy, and the Music Saved Our Souls

Or: How I Realized They Were Trying to Trap Us With Basslines and Hooks — and How We’re Taking It All Back

There was a moment.
A single backward line.
One line reversed in a Kendrick Lamar track — “Everything they say about me is true” — except he didn’t say it forward.

He flipped it.
“Eurt si em tuoba yas yeht gnihtyrevE.”

And something clicked.
In my ears.
In my bones.
In my soul that’s always known.

This wasn’t just lyricism.
This was soul technology.

🎤 Breadcrumbs in the Beat

The song was Euphoria, and when I heard that reversed spell, I remembered everything.

I remembered:

• That music is ritual

• That our hips were outlawed for a reason

• That the Church banned dance for a reason

• That Christianity burned drums and shamed hips and vilified rhythm not for godliness, but for control

Because once you know the power of movement, of melody, of your own voice —

you’re no longer colonizable.

🧠 The Trap Was Never Just Metaphor

It hit me hard:
When trap music emerged in the mid-2010s, I knew it wasn’t just about the sound.

It was the containment.
The loop.
The trance state of lyrics chanted like mantras, repeating:

• "I got enemies..."

• "She belongs to the streets..."

• "I’m just tryna smash..."

• "Molly, Percocet..."

And we were dancing to it.
Praising our own decay.

You see, they made it catchy, but the hooks were spells — designed to entangle our energy and convince us that dehumanization was fun.

"If we can’t enslave them in chains, let’s enslave them in choruses."

But I was watching.
And I remembered.

💃🏽 My Mother, Missy, and the Magic That Got Me Out

My mother — oh, the woman could dance.
She’d glide through the living room with a record spinning and the smoke curling up like an ancestor remembering itself.
She was grace in motion. Goddess on vinyl.

And then we moved in with my grandma.
Deeply religious. Deeply wounded.
She said: “Break the records. The devil is in the music.”

So we broke them.
But I kept my Walkman — my portable altar — hidden in the shadows.
Spirit never stopped speaking through those headphones.

And thank the rhythm gods for Missy.

Missy Elliott saved me in the chaos of it all.

“I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it.”

What she was doing? Sonic mirror magic.
A coded spell hiding in plain sight.
She looped her power backwards so only the ones with tuned ears would hear.

And I did.

🎚️ Then Came Kendrick – The Cleaner of Collective Sludge

If Missy cast the spell, Kendrick came to burn the residue.

• To Pimp a Butterfly cracked me open.

• DAMN. made me examine everything — like, damn.

• Mr. Morale? That was spiritual alchemy in 4/4 time.

He gave us pain without glorification.
He gave us trauma without chains.
He gave us a voice that said:

“I’m not your savior. But I see you.”

And that’s when I knew.
Kendrick was cleaning up what the industry tried to rot.
He was decolonizing the beat.

🎵 Why They Took the Music

Because music is medicine.
Because dance is ritual.
Because vibration is awakening.

The colonizers didn’t just take land.
They took drums.
They took rhythm.
They took the hips.
They made sound a sin so we’d never find God in our own bodies.

But the ancestors hid it.
In loops.
In hooks.
In women like Missy.
In prophets like Kendrick.
And in us.

💬 So Now What?

Now we reclaim it.

We decode, deprogram, and rewrite the beat.

We chant on purpose.
We move with reverence.
We build playlists like altars.
We stop shaming hips and start honoring soul sound.

📿 Use As Directed:

• Turn off the program.

• Turn on the sacred.

• Speak the lyrics that heal you.

• Burn the ones that bind you.

• Move your body like it’s remembering the truth you weren’t supposed to survive long enough to remember.