The Clarion

The Clarion is a local newspaper whose website becomes a prominent venue for the public controversy over Brianna Jackson’s song “On the Come Up.” By presenting the song as an explanation for violence and publishing a petition to remove it, the paper helps shift attention from the students’ protest toward a debate about Brianna’s lyrics and their alleged influence.

The article and its claims

After the Midtown student uprising, Brianna follows a link to an article on The Clarion’s website. The headline, “On the Come Up” Should Come Down: Local Teen Rapper’s Violent Song Leads to Violence, makes the paper’s causal argument explicit: the song is portrayed not merely as controversial but as leading to violence. The article’s author, Emily Taylor, writes as a parent whose thirteen-year-old son likes the track, and describes its references to guns and antipolice sentiment as material that would make a parent stop listening.

The article also incorporates a video from the Ring parking lot confrontation and uses it to characterize Brianna as a gang-affiliated, unruly teenager who was recently removed from a local establishment. It then connects the song to the uprising at Midtown, arguing that a song that encourages violence would naturally encourage violent action. In Brianna’s view, this explanation bypasses why students were protesting in the first place and treats her lyrics as the cause rather than distinguishing them from the students’ actions.

Petition and public response

The article concludes with Taylor’s request that Dat Cloud remove “On the Come Up” from its catalog. She says the song has already caused damage, urges readers to sign a linked petition, and frames removal as necessary to protect children. Brianna’s reaction underscores the exclusion within that appeal: although the petition invokes children’s safety, Brianna does not feel included among the children it claims to protect.

The newspaper’s framing travels beyond its website. When Brianna describes the article and petition during an interview with Hype, she objects that Taylor made her the villain without asking why students had protested. Hype, in turn, raises the lyrics about being armed and the line about being lawless if confronted by a police officer. Brianna disputes the interpretation that she threatened to kill police and points to the different response to her father’s rap at the same age: what is treated as alarming when voiced by a sixteen-year-old girl was not alarming when he said it. The exchange exposes how age and gender shape the reception of the song alongside its words.

Media framing and the limits of the account

The Clarion’s article belongs to a wider cycle in which footage and fragments of the song acquire meanings beyond Brianna’s own account. A television report on the uprising shows students chanting her lyrics and labels the track violent, while the article embeds a separate video from the Ring parking lot. At the Midtown school-district meeting, Karen Pittman likewise cites videos of the incident and calls the song vulgar and violent, arguing that students used it to taunt school staff and endorsing the petition to take it offline. These scenes show the article’s interpretation gaining force through repetition across news coverage, public comment, and online advocacy.

The article is therefore consequential less as a neutral record of the protest than as an intervention in the dispute over its meaning. It offers a clear remedy—remove the song—but, as Brianna observes, leaves the protest’s underlying cause outside its account. By turning a young Black girl rapper into a public symbol of danger, the coverage also reflects the unequal scrutiny she encounters: her lyrics are read as evidence of threat, while her attempt to explain the protest is interrupted or displaced by arguments about what her song supposedly caused.