Marion Write Turns 9/11’s Tragedy to “Sunlight” (Listen, Download & Reflect)

I know I just spent most of the morning making Drake jokes, but if I can be allowed a moment of seriousness....

Navigating this weekend's onslaught of 9/11 coverage wasn't easy. Real people, with real families, died that day. Thousands of them, on the most horrific way possible, and to not remember them and to reflect on that loss would be inhuman. But, perversely, that's exactly what so much of the media coverage did; reduce the victims of 9/11 to neatly packaged stories, inspirational anthems, pawns in a larger global struggle. Consuming that media coverage, then, becomes a kind of emotional pornography, allowing us to connect, to imagine ourselves there - what would he have done if we were in those towers, those planes? - while still remaining safe within the confines of the story.

And so creating any piece of art - movie, music, writing - is fraught with peril. At its best art's fiction can, paradoxically, make the human suffering of 9/11 even more real, and at its worst is simply exploitative. Marion's Write's "The Sunlight" walks this thin line as powerfully and as artistically as any I've come across. So much so that saying anything more would be reductionist. This is hip-hop at its purest potential.