10 Creepy Predictions In Songs That Came True
4. Killah Priest Foresaw The USA Patriot Act On Information
Another spot-on political prediction from the world of hip-hop, here. This time it’s Wu-Tang Clan associate rapper Killah Priest with a worrying premonition about the advance of Orwellian surveillance on the general population.
In his 1998 track Information, Priest raps: “Our telephone conversations will be automatically wire tapped / And transcripted by the National Security Agency”. This was a full three years before the Bush administration signed off on the USA PATRIOT Act, a piece of legislation that essentially gave the government the scope to listen to who they wanted, whenever they wanted in the name of preventing acts of terrorism.
The law was arguably one of the most controversial passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, with critics claiming that it moved America a huge step closer towards being the kind of dystopian, Big Brother-esque police state it had always prided itself on fighting.
Priest’s bars became even more relevant in 2013 after Edward Snowden’s infamous leaks revealed that the National Security Agency were tapping directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to track online communication in a surveillance programme known as Prism.
Serious, serious s**t, and who saw it coming first? The murderous vicar, that’s who.