(AllHipHop News) Common took shots at President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association (NRA) during a performance of Oscar-nominated song Stand Up for Something on Sunday night at the 90th Academy Awards.
The rapper, who alongside singer Andra Day appears on the original song from the movie Marshall, called out President Trump’s “hate” and the powerful gun lobby in a song from the 2017 biopic which urges people to take a stand.
Common, real name Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., dressed entirely in black, prefaced the song with an incendiary spoken word performance before giving way to the vocals of the Rise Up songstress.
“These days we dance between love and hate,” he said. “A president that chose with hate, he don’t control our fate. Because God is great, when they go low we stay in the heights. I stand for peace, love and women’s rights.
“On Oscar night, this is the dream. We tell a land where dreamers live and freedom dwells, immigrants, get the benefits. We put up monuments for the feminists, tell the NRA they in God’s way, and to the people of Parkland we say Ase (a West African philosophy that means to make things happen and produce change)” – including a shoutout to the victim and survivors of the mass school shooting Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were shot and killed last month. The Selma star also offered up “sentiments of love” for the people from “Africa, Haiti to Puerto Rico.”
Common and Andra were also joined onstage by 10 men and women, including Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors; #MeToo movement founder Tarana Burke; eight-year-old Syrian refugee Bana Alabed; 87-year-old Delores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America; and Nicole Hockley, mother of Dylan Hockley, who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.
The NRA was quick to clap back with a response to the performance, sending a video to Common and the Academy about the NRA’s commitment to honoring US veterans, a jab at his vocal support of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the first NFL player to kneel during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans.
