(Stay) Woke

Music, 2008

Painfully-cool perversion of the English language which bankrupts corporations.

In 2008, soul singer Erykah Badu released her album “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)” containing the song “Master Teacher”. In 2014, Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and it became synonymous with the ”Black Lives Matter” movement which emerged after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2013. However, as far back as 1962, the New York Times had an article by novelist William Melvin Kelley entitled “If You’re Woke, You Dig It”.

• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=woke
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=woke
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erykah_Badu
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Melvin_Kelley
• https://www.nytimes.com/1962/05/20/archives/if-youre-woke-you-dig-it-no-mickey-mouse-can-be-expected-to-follow.html