Chris Oledude presents “White Lie: Carolyn’s Story”, a single that initially feels like slipping into a warm bath before you realize the water is slowly turning to ice. If you let your attention drift, the track masquerades perfectly as a vintage soft rock ballad or a slice of polished, satirical blue-eyed soul. There is a bouncing low-end pulse and shimmering, glossy high notes that usually signal a romance on the rocks or a drive down the coast.
But the ear candy is a trap. Oledude, an artist with deep political lineage who treats music as an extension of civic duty, isn’t offering comfort. He has deployed Dr. Wendy A. Ward on lead vocals supported by Lindsey Wilson, Elijah Dixon Owens, and Geoffrey Owens to narrate the devastating perspective of Carolyn Bryant. By wrapping the story of the lie that sparked the lynching of Emmett Till in such seductive R&B packaging, the track creates a wild, nausea-inducing cognitive dissonance.
The juxtaposition is the point. The music mimics the “safety” of the status quo the way privilege constructs a comfortable reality to hide the violence required to maintain it. It is glossy, melodic, and terrifyingly cynical. Listening to it feels like being manipulated, which is precisely how historical revisionism works: it smoothes over the jagged edges of atrocity until they feel palatable.
It forces you to confront a deeply uncomfortable question: how many horrors have we blindly hummed along to just because the melody was catchy?
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