“I try to make things that establish emotion and utility so that not only can people feel it, but they can actually do something with it,” Lupe Fiasco says. “There’s only so much utility you can have in music, but it all boils back down to education and instruction.” For the veteran MC’s contribution to Apple Music’s Freedom Songs 2022, a collection of covers and originals inspired by the 2022 Juneteenth celebration, Fiasco created “Galveston,” a song that forces us to reckon with the unimaginably high cost of freedom. “‘Galveston’ is about taking Juneteenth, which is normally a celebration of a very specific set of events—the manumission from slavery of Black folks—and approaching it from a different angle,” Fiasco says. “Looking at it as the impact of it, versus the event. And one of the impacts of Juneteenth was that the abolition of slavery—it introduced all of this other extra tension and new realities, and some of those new realities weren’t that good. So, 1865, you get abolition of slavery, Emancipation Proclamation, all that good stuff, end of the Civil War. But that same year, you also get the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. So, to me, it was a life-and-death type thing where death was brought to one thing, but then it created life—it gave birth to another thing.”