"A.D. 2000" (Erykah Badu)

On February 4, 1999, four plainclothes officers in the Bronx shot an unarmed immigrant.  The police were on late night patrol, looking for a serial rapist.  They spotted a man who purportedly fit the suspect's description.  When they attempted to stop him, he got scared and ran.  As he reached the vestibule of his building, he pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket.  The police thought it was a gun, and they shot him.  41 times.
The victim's name was Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old aspiring computer programmer from Guinea.  He sold trinkets on 14th Street in Manhattan to raise money for college.  He'd saved up about $9000 toward school, when his visa was about to expire.  Not wanting to be shipped back to Guinea after having come so far, he misrepresented himself when reapplying; he claimed he was an asylum-seeker from Mauritania, a country infamous for human trafficking and myriad human rights violations.  So when the officers stopped him in the wee hours on February 4, 1999, Diallo apparently thought that he'd been found out, and he panicked.
Whatever the case, he was still just an unarmed man who ended up losing his life unjustly.
Understandably, the incident sparked an outcry, particularly when the four officers were acquitted a year later in February 2000.  Joining the dissent, musicians from Wyclef Jean ("Diallo") to Bruce Springsteen ("American Skin") recorded songs about the incident.
So did Erykah Badu.
But her track, which she co-wrote with soul legend Betty Wright and named "A.D. 2000" (the A.D. referring to Amadou Diallo's initials), was less of an indictment of police or a retelling of the story and more of a reality check for society.  Apart from the title being an homage to Diallo himself, it silently asks the question: "How is this kind of injustice still happening in the year 2000?"
The answer is inherent in the lyrics:
No, you won't be namin' no buildings after me
To go down dilapidated
No you won't be namin' no buildings after me
My name will be misstated, surely
On the one hand, she's pointing out that our society really only values and protects those who are wealthy or powerful (i.e. the people with their names on buildings).  On the other hand, she's singing from Diallo's point of view in the afterlife, rejecting any hollow gestures to memorialize his life—i.e. naming some building after him, knowing that his name will be mispronounced in perpetuity and his spirit will be neglected, just as the building will be neglected.
It's a powerful, powerful lyric.
It's also musically rich.  Its singer-songwriter feel kind of surprised me the first time I heard it.  In fact, it still reminds me of early Roberta Flack, where there's some acoustic guitar, Fender rhodes, and a voice—pure and simple.
I particularly love how the track builds ever so subtly, every chorus adding another layer of harmony vocals and another layer of smooth Minimoog counterpoint, contributed by the gifted keyboardist James Poyser.
"A.D. 2000" is the true centerpiece of the album Mama's Gun (2000).