Professor J
Aug 13, 2024
Gat Turner's lyrical predictions often manifest in 'Black August'
If you ever get a chance to listen to “Sha’Carri RICH” – a newly-released song by rap artist Gat Turner that serves as an ode to U.S. track star Sha’Carri Richardson – you might think he recorded the song after Richardson won gold at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
The song opens with a sample of Richardson’s famous “I’m not done” interview that she gave after she finished last in the Prefontaine Classic in Oregon in 2021.
“Count me out if you want to,” Richardson said at the time. “Talk all the shit you want because I’m here to stay.”
The reality is Gat Turner began working on the song about Sha’Carri about a year or so ago. According to his BandCamp site, he released it in July 2024 – more than two weeks before the former LSU track star won gold for her run in the last leg of the 4x100 relay final. The chronology of events establishes a new level of credence for the rap artist known as the “Poet of Prophecy” and serves to distinguish yet another one of his tunes as not only timely but prescient.
Turner says he didn’t intentionally release the song in anticipation of the Olympics and attributes the close proximity of the two events to a higher power.
He says he was inspired to write the song after he saw society castigate Richardson after her decision to seek comfort in cannabis cost her a spot on the Olympic team back in 2021. The athlete revealed that she had been mourning the death of her mother at the time.
“That just kind of irritated me and I felt like I wanted to use my platform to defend her,” Turner explained.
Inspired by her decision to persist in the face of adversity, Turner said penning an ode to Sha'Carri was a matter of “just recognizing God in her and how special she was and what she meant to the culture, you know, because I feel like her spirit transcends the sport and it represents something to our people.”
'Black August' prophesies on the mic
A prior example of Turner’s uncanny gift for making Nostradamus-esque music that seems to foretell the future is “The Fire This Time,” which lyrically presaged the fiery uprising that took place in Milwaukee in 2016 following the fatal police shooting of 23-year-old Sylville Smith – some two years after the song was released.
Quite notably, the 2016 uprising in Milwaukee took place in August, as did She’Carri Richardson’s spectacular feat in Paris. The August connection might be easy to dismiss were it not for the fact that Nat Turner – the preacher who led the deadliest slave revolt in U.S. history – and the namesake for Gat Turner – led his revolt on Aug. 21, 1831.
“Black August,” Turner reminded a Sneaker Theory writer during a recent interview. The term “Black August” is a reference to a month long celebration of Black freedom fighters and an observance of the anniversary of other historical events and milestones in Black history – such as the first arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619.
For Turner, the triumph of Black athletes in the U.S. cannot be separated from the overall and collective historical and contemporary experience of Black people in the United States.
“It’s almost like the United States is cheating [at the Olympics] because the very people that they oppressed are the very people that give them the victory against the world,” Turner said, noting a long list of examples that goes back to Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin at a time when Jim Crow segregation laws in the U.S. were in full effect.
He juxtaposes and laments how Black people in the U.S. are dying in fatal encounters with the police to this day and at the same time represent the nation on the world stage, such as in the Paris Olympics.
“Even though they are killing us wholesale over here and we don't even get justice for it, they call on us to go and save they ass and represent them to the world – and we do it,” Turner said. He theorizes that Olympics observers from other countries probably conclude that Team USA could not beat other countries were it not for America’s Black athletes. The U.S. won 40 gold medals in Paris, and Black women individually won about 20% of Team USA's medals won by US women overall, according to one count by ESSENCE.
Citing the backlash that Black athletes faced for staging protests such as the Black power salute given by Tommie Smith and Wayne Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Turner charged America with seeking to “break the spirit and will of any Black athlete that has a social consciousness or has any type of defiance toward the establishment.”
He said his song was not only meant to pay homage to Sha’Carri Richardson, but Black athletes in general and Black female athletes in particular, such as WNBA star Angel Reese, who go on to become champions despite the criticism they face for being themselves and standing up for what they believe.
“Me making this song was not only an ode to Sha’Carri Richardson, but ‘Sha’Carri Rich’ is an attitude and demeanor, the way we carry ourselves,” Turner says. “We don't just win. We win in dynamic fashion.”