Jay-Z Wants You To Find Your Freedom

We get to reimagine what our liberation looks like

“Lock my body

Can’t trap my mind…” — Jay-Z “Can I Live”

It’s me, Joel Leon and I’m back at it — another week, another edition of “What Would Hov Do?” in 2021! For those not in the now, #WWHD is the Medium column where each and every week I tackle some of life’s biggest hurdles and issues, all with the help of Jay-Z lyrics.

If there’s a topic you’d want to see tackled with a little help from Jay-Z, feel free to drop your question or issue here and me and the god emcee will help you get through it.

With all of the events that transpired at the capitol this week, I think this week is about hitting the pause button and reflecting for a moment on a very important topic: liberation. And not the kind of liberation that asks of a white supremacist system to be less white supremacy, but the kind of liberation that frees us from the bondage of the physical and leads us to a freedom more tangible: the freedom of spirit and mind.

This Jay-Z “Can I Live” lyric, pulled from Reasonable Doubt, is not only a nod to the brothers and sisters trapped inside the prison industrial system, but also to those outside those walls living in the prison of our imaginations, or rather the lack of…