For Mississippi conservative hip-hop artist Christopher “Topher” Townsend, rap is about empowerment.
Not only an artist, Topher served in the U.S Air Force. He sees the current policies and ideologies infiltrating the country as corroding the traditional values for which he stands and spreading a poisonous message of powerlessness.
Topher’s music emboldens his audience to remember their potential and stand their ground.
“All I’m trying to do is bring people to the truth,” Topher told The Epoch Times. “The establishment wants us to shut up and be its puppets, so I’m trying to hold the conversation. If it gets us to where we can’t have conversations, nothing will ever change.”
Topher grew up in Kilmichael, Mississippi, where he cultivated his love of hip hop by listening to artists like Eminem who he said inspired him to tell stories through a way of rapping that portrays the more authentic realities of growing up in a troubled home and the struggle to make one’s own way through self-actualization and hard work.
This message was contrary to many of the themes of contemporary rap at a time that celebrated unrealistic, gangster lifestyles while endorsing misogyny and violence.
At the age of 10, Topher discovered that writing songs helped him release emotions he couldn’t express in conversation, an art he might have inherited from his father, an acclaimed blues musician in Kilmichael who goes by the stage name Little Willie Farmer.
Topher’s relationship with language carried on into his time in the military from 2011 to 2017, when he worked as a cryptologic language analyst.
Although he didn’t identify as a conservative, he voted Republican in 2016 while building an audience on TikTok addressing conservative issues.
Topher became outspoken in his support for former President Donald Trump, and appeared on podcast, radio, and television interviews such as Fox and Friends in 2020.
“I just want to make a clear distinction here before we go ahead: we’re talking about the two presidential candidates that we have,” he told Fox and Friends. “When we’re talking about Joe Biden … while he was concerned about his kids growing up in a ‘racial jungle,’ Trump was receiving awards alongside Civil Rights activists Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks.”
He released his first album “No Apologies” in 2021 after his December 2020 single “The Patriot” featuring fellow veteran, The Marine Rapper.
The song reached number 1 on the Billboard Rap Digital Song Sales.
After Topher and The Marine Rapper performed “The Patriot” at a Veterans for Trump rally near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the song was pulled without explanation from several platforms, including Spotify.
Still, he gained success, with one of his songs, “I Left My Home,” a collaboration between Mjhanks and The Marine Rapper, appearing in the Denzel Washington-directed movie “A Journal of Jordan,” with two of his other songs used in the Sylvester Stallone-produced film “MVP,” directed by Nate Boyer.
‘It’s OK to Love America’
While not received with open arms into the music industry, he found a wide audience for his music, from children to senior citizens, by introducing themes that had previously been scarce in hip hop.
“I offer a perspective that is not popular with the mainstream audience,” Topher said. “I talk about self-accountability, self-reliance, patriotism, and traditional Christian values.”
Topher wrote “The Patriot” to say, “It’s OK to love America,” he said, as anti-American propaganda increases.
“The problem is only getting worse,” he said. “Social media and big corporations are tightening their grip on the social conscience of the nation with their bias toward conservatives and anything patriotic.”
The mainstream media’s framing of issues related to race is only creating more division, he said.
The heavy-handed use of critical race theory (CRT) and carrying water for Marxist organizations such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) that paint black people as victims of systemic racism is harming black people, Topher said.
“Black people were injured. However, instead of being challenged to get back to where we were, we’re being told we may never walk again, but we will get compensated,” Topher said. “CRT and BLM movements want to tell us we are permanently hurt, and they are here to take care of us.”
The problem with this, Topher said, is where there’s a victim, there’s the self-proclaimed victor who derives power from those they “save.”
“This is why I’m very big on self-accountability and limited government, because when you become dependent on groups like that, they can control you,” he said.
Exposing the Ugliness
Topher lives an hour and 45 minutes away from Democrat-run Jackson, a city plagued by high murder rates and crime as well as what Topher would call poor management, which has left the capital city without safe drinking water several times throughout the years.
On Tuesday, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) was elected to his 15th term representing Mississippi’s 2nd congressional district that includes Jackson. He defeated Republican Brian Flowers.
Thompson, who is also chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, launched an investigation into the water crisis in which he has so far blamed climate change, racism, white flight, and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for alleged disinvestment of federal funds from the city.
Topher, not just a man of words like most politicians and entertainment artists, rented and filled a 24-foot U-Haul with six pallets of water and drove it to the most dilapidated and dangerous parts of Jackson in September. There, the sight of living conditions could leave one speculating on why the city’s representation is spending its time on empty investigations while ignoring real issues—a grandstanding that Topher said is masking the truth.
“At the end of the day, we can’t come together on anything until we get to the truth, and the truth is going to make a lot of politicians look ugly, which many people aren’t going to want to accept,” he said.
It’s going to be a long fight, Topher admitted, but he’s starting to see a shift, specifically in the black community.
“That’s why I feel it’s important to keep the conversation going,” he said.
“The people are starting to see that the establishment really doesn’t care about us, so we need to expose that ugliness. We need to keep talking and not let them shut us up.”
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Matt McGregor covers news and features throughout the United States. Send him your story ideas:
matt.mcgregor@epochtimes.us
