Smooch Music has dropped a new video for Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” released in celebration of Black History Month.
The video features Angelou’s voice reading the iconic poem across hip-hop beats — “You may shoot me with your words/You may cut me with your eyes/You may kill me with your hatefulness/But still, like dust, I’ll rise” — as footage of the Civil Rights Movement and current protests play.
The track is off Caged Bird Songs, a posthumous album released in 2014. A deluxe edition of the record will be released in support of Black Lives Matter; you can pre-save it here. The single, which Smooch Music released with Vydia, will be officially released on Friday. Proceeds will be given to the Maya Angelou Foundation.
“Music was such a huge part of my grandmother’s life,” Colin A. Johnson, Angelou’s grandson and founder of Caged Bird Legacy, said in a statement. “She loved everything, from pop to country and, of course, hip-hop. With her dedication to social activism and how she illuminated the struggles and injustices of the urban experience through prose, there’s a direct correlation to hip-hop today.”
