“Future’s work offers a necessary reckoning with the limits of hope, the permanence of loss, and the urgent need to imagine new paradigms for Black liberation.”

In April 2017, Future released “Mask Off,” the hypnotic, menacing anthem that would become one of his biggest hits and the centerpiece of his self-titled album, Future. Built around a sample from Tommy Butler’s “Prison Song”—a composition originally featured in The “Selma” Album, a theatrical project honoring Martin Luther King Jr.—the song’s eerie flute loop carries echoes of a Civil Rights–era vision of uplift and deliverance. Butler’s original track is a solemn plea for resilience, urging Black men to hold on to hope in the face of oppression.