Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
So happy to see a track about enjoying fatherhood and taking it seriously. Most rappers claim to be about “representing reality”, but all too often they represent the most commercially viable side of reality – a thin reflection of “road life”. Fatherhood on the other hand is something that many of us really deal with, and it’s great to have one of the best rappers talking clearly and positively about it.
This is a great example of positive underground London music celebrating youth culture and diversity. Big ups to True Tiger and P Money.
Co-authored by Sukant Chandan of Sons of Malcolm and Carlos Martinez of Beat Knowledge
To make it clear from the outset, we are not saying that Maverick Sabre and Professor Green are racists; not at all. From what we know about them, they are aware of many social and cultural issues. From reading interviews with Maverick Sabre in particular, it’s clear he is a conscious brother with great talent and intelligence. Professor Green is also an intelligent, talented and well-respected artist who undoubtedly opposes racism. This track and video may even have been conceived as an attempt to address some negative aspects of our lives in order to move positively away from them.
Nevertheless, the most anti-racist and conscious of us will never wholly rid ourselves of white supremacist ideas, as they have been beaten into our consciousness, constantly reinforced by the education system, the media and the music industry, which always seeks to colonise our youth and community’s natural wealth: our culture. So it’s important for us to look out for each other when we might slip up, and discuss in a mutually respectful and calm way in order to build towards freeing our peers in our communities from the mess we are in. Many of us are doing this in many ways, including in such forums such as the recent Hip-Hop History evening, an inspirational event featuring a panel that included highly respected artists such as Lowkey and Akala, at which over a hundred youth took part in a deep debate on issues such as sexism, racism and violence within music.
So although we understand that Maverick and Professor not racist, we consider that there are a number of very problematic elements to the track ‘Jungle’, which combined with the music video raises some deeply troubling issues.
The video is based in Hackney, in North East London. Hackney is one of the poorest boroughs in England and has a high concentration of working class people, including high concentrations of peoples from backgrounds from the Caribbean and Africa, Turkish and Kurdish peoples, and East European and Asian. The video starts of with Green stating:
“Welcome to Hackney, a place where I think somebody’s been playing Jumanji.
A manor where man are like animals, an’ they’ll yam on you like they yam on food.”
So this video features two white artists telling a story about how life in Hackney is like a “jungle”. To show this, exclusively Black people are used to portray a “jungle” life of back-stabbing, violence and crime – a dog-eat-dog world where the only two white people in the video are simply observing.
Apart from one young man, the video depicts only Black men committing graphic violence against other Black men with the use of various weapons including firearms. Admittedly, this is not the behaviour of upstanding human beings concerned with their fellow humans, but to compare these people to animals in the context of this video whereby those passing comment (Sabre and Green) are white men surrounded by a sea of Black on Black ultra-violence leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Or as one friend put it in relation to the video: “Dehumanised discourse, stereotypical ‘Black behaviour’, while two white boys take an observational stance, worried about getting ‘yammed’”.
We don’t know how much input Green had into the writing and the direction of the music video. Often in the mainstream industry, artists have very little say on the artwork and videos, so it would be interesting to know Green’s level of involvement in the conceptualisation, writing, directing and editing of the video. As it stands, this video is more akin to Daily Mail propaganda: fear culture injected into the underground music scene.
The theme of de-humanising the Black subjects in the video continues with Green stating:
“London ain’t cool to cruise through where the hunters pray, Looking lunch today, and your chains looking like fresh fruit to a hungry ape.”
Although several other ‘jungle’ animals are used to talk about Black crime in Hackney, using the term “ape” in a video (when the word is mentioned the video cuts to a young Black man’s face at 1:13secs) is massively insensitive. Is it so difficult to understand that this can be construed as deeply offensive and racist?
Presumably some would argue that it’s just a fair representation of reality, where Black people are over-represented in street gangs (an issue that deserves to be dealt with in a serious and considered manner). However:
a) While many gangs might be majority Black, most have white members as well. Given that Professor Green is a white artist making music that has its origins in the Black community, you’d think he would have the cultural sensitivity to paint a more balanced picture. Yes, Professor Green is from the ‘ends’ himself and is perfectly entitled to comment on what life in poor inner-city neighbourhoods is like (indeed this is to be welcomed), but we can’t afford to ignore the issue of race, which still runs deep in the society we live in. As the respected US professor Cornel West points out: “All people with black skin and African phenotype are subject to potential white supremacist abuse.”
b) Any artist trying to communicate a socially relevant idea has a responsibility beyond simply painting a picture of a dystopian reality. In the words of the legendary singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson: “The role of the artist is not simply to show the world as it is, but as it ought to be.” The net result of this video is to promote white supremacist ideas – that’s not helpful.
c) No doubt Sabre and Green would claim to be anti-racist. Hence they need to actively take responsibility for countering racist attitudes. Racism is overwhelmingly concentrated in the white community; therefore white cultural figures such as Green (especially where he’s making a good living off Black music) need to have a clear, unambiguous, public anti-racist policy and to be an example to others.
Hackney has some of the worst levels of working class crime in the country. The reasons for this are many: for example, high levels of unemployment; poor provision of youth services; gentrification; concentration of poverty; neglect from the state; and many more.
Hackney has a large Black population and high levels of crime but our mainstream media does a very good job to portray non-white people in England as untrustworthy, crime-loving, dangerous savages and all this video seems to do is reinforce and glamorise that, which is a great shame as Sabre and especially Green are actually in a position to challenge that.
Also, there are plenty of white people involved in crime in east London, but to someone who relies on the Daily Mail or the Sun for information, this video would simply confirm their prejudices that violent crime is an exclusively Black affair.
Again it promotes ideas that Black people are condemned to a world of Black on Black violence. When in reality, the main problems for Black people are deep-seated racism that affects every aspect of their lives. From being 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police, twice as likely to be unemployed as white people, racism in our schools (which actively deletes Black people’s history in relation to England) which creates racist attitudes in society at large through to the dehumanisation of Black peoples of the Caribbean and Africa.
Instead of just saying ‘this is how it is’, could not have Sabre and Green not done something to show why it is like that? Hackney being the second poorest borough in the country obviously has a lot to do with the fact that for many people being a part of the system is not an option. Surely reinforcing white stereotypes of Black people was not the intention but as Sabre said in a recent interview: “If you’ve got four minutes in someone’s head, in someone’s room, a young person – why say bullshit to them? The most important thing to me is that people can say I really connected to your song, whatever the song may be, and I understand something about myself more or something about society more.”
It also has to be said, for fear of sounding clichéd, most of our youth are humble, intelligent young people who want to do well in life even though they are usually aware and spend nearly every day of their lives countering the many obstacles a racist and exploitative system puts before them.
Our youth need a culture that is not scared to address the negatives, but in a way that uplifts them, inspires and informs them, and gives due credit and direction to the potential and actual power that is in the hands of our youth. We are not “apes”! We are beautiful and intelligent human beings who are fighting for our cultural, moral, social and political freedoms. And for those who are falling victim to the society’s traps, our job is to unite with them positively and bring them into our freedom struggles.
On the last day of Black History Month, I can’t understand why this song hasn’t been *everywhere* for the last 31 days. Dubbledge uses the notorious Willie Lynch letter (here’s the Wikipedia entry) to explain how the slave masters cultivated slave mentality, and how this has been passed on from generation to generation.
Great lyric, great flow, great voice, great beat – let’s spread it further.
I’ve got this big old house, living larger than ever
Bought some slaves at the walks and work hard they’d better
Cos I’ve got this leather wire lace bull whip
I’ll tie him to the tree and I’ll beat that nigger
Best call me massa, best call me sir
I ship them in from Africa
And I’ll even use the bible as part of my plan
And teach them that they the son of Ham
Cos Ham had a son that was cursed to be a slave
And serve his brothers for the rest of his days
Make you my slave, you don’t like it, oh well
A white man’s heaven is a black man’s hell
I bring ? by changing the scripture
Send them to church, make ’em praise my picture
Cos I’m a put a picture of myself as the saviour
So looking up to me is just a part of they nature
Take away they history, take away they past
Take away their culture, kick ’em in the arse
Read a book in class, made so much sense
Called ‘Making of a Slave’ by Willie Lynch
And will I lynch? You damn right, sonny
I’ll even kill some children in front of their mummy
Cos that’ll make their mother want to protect her seed
And fear will make her raise them to do what I need
And she’ll breed that thought into future generations
And future generations will breed the same thought into future generations
Slave mentality will soon become just a part of their personality
And that mentality will get passed along
So they’ll keep suppressing one another when I’m gone
And that’ll carry on til the end of days
So I can sit back while the slaves make the slaves make the slaves
That make you the slave
Run!
Check Dubbledge on Bandcamp.
Most of you who keep up with current hip-hop will have peeped the new Statik Selektah and Termanology album, 1982. So far this is my favourite track of the album. Termanology has got a great voice and good flows, but I’m not generally into his lyrical content; however, it’s great to see him exploring socially relevant ideas in this collaboration with Reks, who has more of a reputation as a ‘conscious’ MC.
Reks kicks things off with a classic ‘keep your head up’-themed verse:
The government don’t love us, they told us we were two-thirds
Human being, you MCing, keeping them scared
Keeping ’em worried, that’s why they bury Panthers
Bobby Seale prolly fist still up in the air
Who murdered Malcolm, who murdered Pac, who murdered Big?
Is there a heaven out there from this hell we live?
Right in this hell we live, I tell my son to dream big
See he don’t understand what struggle is
Or how the government planned to keep us in ghettos
Drug dealers our heros, I come to tears
Thinking the black leadership shrinking
Cos of innate feeling that we inferior, fearing our peers
Niggaz is, always was free
Even when we fall like Sir Humpty
We pick up the pieces
From following leaders to leading demons from the dark
Ghetto is our Garden of Eden
Long as you breathin’ gotta keep your head believin’, boss
Reks’s verse is basically optimistic, saying we *will* make progress. Term’s verse is arguably more nihilistic, explaining the messed up situation without showing a path out of it. However, it’s great to have this overview of the Puerto Rican experience in the US, which, given the role played by Puerto Ricans in the development of hip-hop, is not heard often enough.
My people came to this country in 1950
Now my family are mean Puerto Ricans
So that alone shows you that we know a different struggle
Americans got heritage we didn’t fuck wit
Like that racism, and the prejudice
We was only here to get them dead presidents
We weren’t here for the slavery or the bravery
Of the women who fought so they could get their right to vote
We was them dirty Spanish kids on the trifest boats
We was in them cold-ass houses, no lights and soap
Now you’ve been schooled in why we do shootings
Move drugs and treat our women abusive
Cos that’s all we ever knew from day one
Ain’t got a dollar but uffin’ to make one
We had our own rules and this is not all we know
But we learnt to pack the [gun?] when we learnt to rock the coke
There pappy go, gettin so populoso
With his 4-4, more chains than Loso
Caucasians, Asians and Latinos all buy from us
So we be on the d-lo, killing every race including our own people
Until somebody snitch on us and we in chino
We Latino, feeling of the proudest race
Before we powdered our face, Jesucristo
Was the man that our momma used to talk about
Papa somehow made it to church, though we fallin’ out
We never had a great leader in America tellin’ us keep ya head up
Shit got me fed up
So now these young bucks going for the cheddar
Put masks on they faces, straps on they waistses,
Sip hennessee out the bag, no chasers
Keep ratchets in they bag or they basements,
Man this shit’s outrageous
Statik’s production is, as ever, bumping and soulful; a perfect complement to Reks’s and Termanology’s vocals.
Get the album on iTunes
Termanology on Twitter
Reks on Twitter
Statik Selektah on Twitter
Big respect to Big Cakes for this one. Not too many rappers right now are highlighting the struggles Africans are going through, as well as celebrating African history and culture, so it’s a lot that Big Cakes is willing to go against the flow and come with a positive and important message.
Incidentally, the track is by no means meant to alienate non-Africans – Cakes says clearly that he stands for unity, “black, blue, white, green – every colour”. However, Africa needs to be highlighted – it is widely ignored in our Eurocentric culture, and yet it is the continent that has suffered most from colonialism, slavery and white supremacy.
Once again, respect to Big Cakes.
Follow Big Cakes on Twitter, and buy the track on iTunes – we’ve got to support the music we want to hear!
Take a few minutes to read this in-depth interview with the very talented revolutionary rapper Jasiri X, which appeared on examiner.com a few days ago.
Gone are the days when rappers actually had something of substance to say when they picked up the microphone. The late 80’s and early 90’s were filled with Hip-Hop acts that raged against the machine while most of today’s acts are simple and overly hedonistic. I guess everything is all good.
Pittsburgh MC Jasiri X is a throwback to acts like Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Paris, and X-Clan. His lyrics are not about being combative but more about doing the right thing. With rhymes steeped in factuality Jasiri X is a breath of fresh air to Hip-Hop in 2010.
I spoke with Jasiri X about the Tea Party Movement, police brutality in the inner city, his upcoming album Ascension, and why Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame are part of a modern day minstrel show.
SS: I first heard of you from your song What if the Tea Party was Black? Talk about why you decided to record that song and explain the meaning behind it.
Jasiri X: It really came from a conversation that I had with Paradise the Architek from X-Clan. He sent me an article written by a gentleman named Tim Wise. The article basically said, imagine if the Tea Party was black. I read the article and I thought it was decent. I saw Paradise later on and he asked me about it. I said it was cool, and he said that it would make a great song. I was like, “Wow, it would.” At that point in time it was instantaneous and I just started writing.
The purpose was to show media bias. It wasn’t about the Tea Party as much as it was about how they’ve been covered. It’s interesting to me when you hear them talk about revolution and see them with guns. We know the history of our revolutionary organizations and how the government conspired to destroy them, but what if black people decided to march on Washington with guns? How would they treat us? We know it would be a lot harsher treatment than the Tea Party gets. I’m somebody that always analyzes and studies the media. It was right along the lines of what I like to do as far as exposing the biases that I see in the media–especially when it comes to our people.
SS: Race has been in the news recently with people like Shirley Sherrod, Jesse Jackson, and Mel Gibson making headlines. Recently I had a discussion with my 15-year old cousin concerning Jesse Jackson’s allegation that Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert had the mentality of a slave master. My cousin said, “Why are people still talking about slavery? Why do people still bring up race?” I’ve heard similar comments from people of all colors recently but it shocked me coming from a young black man. What would you say in response to my cousin’s questions about why race and slavery are still brought up in 2010?
Jasiri X: Wow. I would talk to him about how race matters. It’s sad because you would think that in 2010 we would have witnessed Dr. King’s dream by now. Especially with the election of President Obama, we would have moved beyond it. What you see with the election of President of Obama is it’s gotten even more racial. I’d talk to him about Oscar Grant because everybody missed that when LeBron James made his decision on ESPN. Grant was a young brother in Oakland who was shot point blank in the back on video tape. The officer was charged with involuntary manslaughter. I would show your cousin how statistics say that young black men born after 1991 have a 91% chance of going to jail at least once in their life. The percentage for white people is just 5. I’d talk to him about graduation statistics and employment statistics. Even today when we go before a judge after committing the same crime we get longer sentences than white offenders. The reality is, race is still a problem.
Here in Pittsburgh we were called America’s most livable city. At the same time a report was issued saying that we have the poorest black community of any of the major cities in the United States. Black children under 5-years old are poorer in Pittsburgh than anywhere else in the United States. That’s the disparity right there. If your cousin lived in the hood I’d say look at your neighborhood and ask why is it not like the neighborhoods of others.
SS: He does live in the hood! He’s on the west side of Chicago and it’s serious over there…
Jasiri X: Wow. Oh yeah. I’m originally from the south side so I understand. I would say look around your own neighborhood, you know?
SS: Tell me about the American History X mixtape that you dropped a few months ago.
Jasiri X: The idea came about from watching the movie. The movie deals with race which is a topic that I deal with often. The white student writes a History paper about Hitler and the black principal takes him into the office and says, “I’m your history teacher now, our topics are going to be about current events, and the class is going to be called American History X.” This Week is a video blog where I was dealing with a lot of current events and issues–the mixtape was right along those same lines.
SS: Earlier you mentioned Paradise the Architek; how did you hook up with Paradise?
Jasiri X: Man, just found out he lived in Pittsburgh! I’m someone who is definitely inspired by X-Clan. We ended up hooking up but what’s interesting is when we did it wasn’t about rap. Paradise is someone who has a tremendous love for our people. He’d call me every time a young person lost their life in Pittsburgh and ask me, “What are gonna do?” We ended up getting with some other young brothers who love Hip-Hop and love working with young people and formed a group called 1 Hood.
After organizing with 1 Hood and doing the anti-violence things in Pittsburgh we got to the music. I almost gave up Hip-Hop because I didn’t think people wanted to hear conscious rap. It changed for me when I wrote the song Free the Jena 6. It ended up being played all over the country and Michael Baisden was the catalyst for that. I ended up in Jena and people responded well to the song saying it touched their lives. It showed me that people really wanted to hear Hip-Hop with substance and a message. That’s when Paradise and I really started working on music together.
SS: Going back to the era when X-Clan came out, acts like X-Clan, Public Enemy and Brand Nubian were at the forefront of rap, now acts like that you won’t see on BET. Why do you think that’s changed in less than 20 years?
Jasiri X: The powers that be of the industry will say outright that that music doesn’t sell. A group like Little Brother who you might not even classify as conscious, I would say they’re conscious or have intelligent music; BET wouldn’t play their video because they said their music was too intelligent for their audience. I think what happened was this industry created a formula for a hit record. People began focusing on making hit records instead of music that inspires and educates. It was like if you don’t fit into this formula that equals hit we aren’t going to support you. The industry is saying we won’t invest in you because you won’t be this big monster hit. This is actually why we started putting our videos on YouTube to show that people want to hear this type of Hip-Hop. It’s good to be able to negotiate a contract and say we have a half a million views on YouTube and people want to hear this type of music.
If you look at the history of the representation of black people in the industry and the media its always been this negative portrayal. It seems to me that now the industry says we only want two representations of black men. Either you’re this unintelligent gangster super thug or you’re this effeminate non-threatening person with super tight jeans. It seems like the media has always had a problem with an intelligent strong black man. Women have it worse. If they don’t want to get buck naked they don’t have a place for you in this industry. This is why me, Paradise, and others have said that we’ll do it independently. There is a market there. There are people that want my music, there’s people that want good conscious Hip-Hop with a message. Look at what’s happening to the industry, it’s collapsing on itself because it’s not producing real good music that people want to listen to. What really destroyed Hip-Hop was when people went into the studio and tried to make hit records instead of making good quality music. What you get out of that is junk. You get a whole bunch of attempts at a hit record and they’re terrible. I took the opposite approach and said I want to make quality music that has an impact and talks about what’s happening.
You’re in Chicago the violence is off the chain! Violence, poverty, the recession, the intense attack on President Obama; all these issues we have and we’re still talking about making it rain? We’re talking about swag? I tend to also get mad at Hip-Hop fans because the fans don’t demand real good music. If the industry is pushing you the fans will accept you. We’ll accept Rick Ross even though we know he’s lying. We know he was a C.O. and he wasn’t a big time hustler. We accept it because the industry is pushing it.
SS: I interviewed Scoop Jackson from ESPN and I asked him why Hip-Hop changed from conscious rap to mostly gangsta rap. He said Hip-Hop didn’t dictate that but the people did. He said in the late 80’s and early 90’s Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton played a much bigger role in the community then than they do now. There is no so-called black leader now so the rappers are a reflection of the people…
Jasiri X: I love Scoop but that’s just absolutely ridiculous. The reason I say that is because I live in the hood. Everybody is not a killer. Everybody is not selling drugs. When you analyze it, it’s a small segment of the people in the community living that life. It’s not everybody. I was just in London Homes; I got a lot of family there. Are there people there doing what they gotta do? Yeah. Sure. But it’s not everybody that lives there. What happens is it’s glamorized. At 1 Hood we walked the worst neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Homewood. Before we started walking it was five shootings in a 21 hour period– a three and a four-year old got shot. We said enough is enough, black men we’re going to get together and walk these streets. What we found out was it really wasn’t that bad. There were a couple of trouble areas but it’s not what’s portrayed. My thing is, yeah we have violence and hustling in the hood but definitely not at the level that these rappers talk about.
SS: On the block that I grew up on there was crime, but there was literally like two houses that people sold drugs out of. Everybody else on the block went to work every day and minded their own business.
Jasiri X: [Laughs] Exactly! Did what they had to do to survive.
SS: Drugs bring guns, people who use drugs steal, and it’s a never ending cycle…
Jasiri X: It’s definitely a vicious cycle. What we saw in Pittsburgh is a change in the policing. It went away from a community policing where people knew the officers and they were from your community. Most of the people that police our communities are white. They’re these hyper ex-soldier type guys that come from the suburbs and rarely have interaction with black people therefore there is no relationship there. That’s why they’re pushing for people to snitch. It used to be where people in the community had a relationship with the police and would talk to them.
An honor student in Pittsburgh named Jordan Miles was beaten severely by the police. He looked like Emmitt Till. He had his locks ripped out of his head. He’s an honor student and a violinist who played for Michelle Obama when she visited Pittsburgh. He was just walking to his grandmother’s house and some undercover cops jumped out on him so he ran. He didn’t know they were cops and they gave him the beat down. The police are defiant in the face of that and the head of the F.O.P says they followed their training. They charged this young brother with resisting arrest and he’s an honor student who never had any history with the police–as if beating him down and ripping the locks out of his head wasn’t enough. Look at the history of America, sex and violence is what America is founded on and what America loves to digest.
SS: I haven’t been stopped by the cops in a while. I’m 34-years old but when I was a teenager I was stopped constantly. It was always humorous to me because I was never in any kind of trouble but the house across the street from me was flooded with drug dealers and the police never bothered them. A lot of these cops work with drug dealers. They take payoffs or shakedown these small-time dope dealers so they aren’t concerned about policing the community. Earlier you mentioned that there should be more black police officers in black neighborhoods but in my experiences the black cops are way worse than the white ones. So how would you propose to change this?
Jasiri X: Yeah, yeah. You’re absolutely right. Pittsburgh was one of the first cities they used the RICO Act on. To talk to those brothers who were victims of that they didn’t get hit until they actually stopped selling drugs [laughs]. I think ultimately what we have to do is begin to police our own communities. It’s like education; do I send my child to this school that really doesn’t care about my child? Or do I take it upon myself to home school my child? We’re being pushed to do for self and practice self sufficiency. Ultimately it’s our neighborhood. On the block that I live on if I see someone breaking into my neighbors’ house I have a responsibility to say, “Nah, you’re not breaking into my neighbors’ house,” because the next house you’ll break into is mine.
The solution is we have to organize block by block and community by community to say we’re going to watch out for one another. Sadly people are afraid to approach these young brothers–they’re approachable. You can say, “Hey, on this block right here we’re watching out. It might be wise to leave us alone.” At the same time our tax dollars pay the salary of the police. With this organization 1 Hood we went up against the police a few times. When we first went up against the police an officer pulled a gun on a 7-year old girl and said he was going to blow her brains out. There were five witnesses to this account. What they tend to do is drag the case out and what we tend do is get real hype when it first happens and then go back to sleep. We have to begin to organize for the duration and hold the police responsible for what they’re supposed to do. What happened was the mother was charged with disturbing the peace because she was calling on Jesus to save her from the wicked police officer. They ended up dropping the charges against her but the judge said he did not believe that this officer would do something like that even though there were five eye witnesses. Less than a year later that officer shot and killed a mentally disturbed man. When we go and speak we bring that stuff up. We have to hold the officers accountable for the jobs they’re supposed to do and not be afraid to do that as well.
SS: Back to the music, I heard a song of yours called Blackface and another song called Just A Minstrel. How do you differentiate between someone having fun and being themselves versus someone putting on a minstrel show?
Jasiri X: Being yourself, are you really being yourself? To me that’s the $64 million dollar question. I read in XXL magazine that Gucci Mane had an academic college scholarship for computer science. So when we see Gucci Mane playing this role is he being himself? Obviously this dude is super-intelligent. Lil’ Wayne is very intelligent. When you see them acting out like this are they being themselves? I would say no. T-Pain? No. They’re playing a character. When they get caught and get on that witness stand like The Game you can tell. The Game’s lawyer said, “Do not call my client a gangsta rapper. That’s not what he is.” They’ll get on that stand and say that’s not really me, I’m playing a character.
Why is it that the character that they’re playing resembles a minstrel act from the 1920’s and 30’s? Why can’t you being an intelligent man reflect that in your music? If Gucci Mane would be goofy in one video and an intelligent business man in the next I would say OK, in this video he’s having fun and in this video he’s handling business. If in every video you’re showing all your teeth and high on pills that’s not real. Especially when you’re going in front of the judge and talking about how you want to change your life and be a role model.
SS: Waka Flocka Flame…
Jasiri X: Lord have mercy.
SS: [LAUGHS] He got into some minor verbal thing with Method Man. One of the things he said was that people don’t want to hear intelligent lyrics, I’m paraphrasing but that’s basically what he said. I’ve actually never heard one of his songs..
Jasiri X: You don’t want to hear it [laughs].
SS: I don’t think that guy is playing a character. I think that’s really him.
Jasiri X: No. To understand who Waka Flocka Flame is… Do you know who his mother is?
SS: No.
Jasiri X: His mother managed Gucci Mane and Nicki Minaj. How hard did you have it if your mom is managing Gucci and Nicki Minaj? You got some money now! That’s the mentality that the record labels have. The record label will say Soulja Boy had a million hits, did a dance, and sold some records so in their mind this is proof that people don’t want to hear lyrics anymore, but explain the success that Jay-Z and Eminem have. To me that’s a cop out. This is somebody who has no respect for the culture of Hip-Hop. He just wants to make money. His mom is managing Gucci so he can get Gucci and Nicki Minaj on a song so it’s like why not put some songs out there and you can make money too. He didn’t have to go through what most rappers have to go through to get on.
Even if you were the hood rapper you have to have some skills. You have to be able to say some rhymes to make the people in the hood say, “That’s him–he’s the one.” He never had to go through that. Because of how he got on and how quickly he got on he doesn’t have the same appreciation and respect for the culture and the music because he didn’t have to pay those dues. He’ll go out as fast as he came in–just watch. People that have an easy time getting on don’t last long. Look at the stories of Jay-Z, Eminem, and Diddy. They had a hard road, they fought. Every record label turned Jay-Z down and he financed his own record. They worked hard just to get their foot in the door. Their grind level is different.
We have an artist here in Pittsburgh named Wiz Khalifa. I’ve known him since he was 16-years old and when I met him he was dead set on being a professional Hip-Hop artist. He had a mindset like a 25-year old. He was in the studio back then, he wasn’t playing the block. He signed with Warner Bros, it didn’t turn out like people thought it would and it made him grind even harder. There was a time in Pittsburgh when there was a hate campaign for Wiz. He used to have to have a bodyguard.
SS: Why?
Jasiri X: It was two reasons. He’s young and his management is young. They made a mistake by marketing him as the only thing that’s happening in Pittsburgh. He also had a couple of street type songs. A lot of the rappers are heavy in the streets and they had a problem because they knew he wasn’t heavy in the streets. Wiz just hadn’t found himself yet and now he’s found himself as an artist. His management learned from those early mistakes. They reached back to Pittsburgh and when Wiz comes back to the city he’s like the Steelers now. It wasn’t easy and that dude went through a lot. I think he’s going to have a longer career than these dudes who just got a co-sign from a big star to get on. Wiz built his own machine and he’s going to be around a lot longer because of what he went through that I witnessed first hand.
SS: Talk about the album you have coming out.
Jasiri X: I’m really excited, it comes out in January. It’s really to me my first real album. American History X is a good album and we got the Pittsburgh Hip-Hop album of the year award but it was more like a compilation of my episodes. What you’ll find on American History X is me talking about things going on around the world and things that affect us. This is the first album where I get to get a little more into myself and just spit on some stuff. I put a couple songs out where I just spit and I’m nice with it. I can spit on this mic. It’s produced entirely by a producer named Rel!g!on out of Vancouver, Canada. He did a song last season that was very popular called Silent Night. I got with him and this new company called Wandering Worx — myself and Planet Asia were the first acts signed to it.
I’m just excited about an album that’s separate from me doing political stuff. As an artist you get more of a wider range of me on the album. It’s called Ascension. When we do the This Week with Jasiri X series we do nine episodes, nine weeks straight. So it’s nine new songs and nine new videos. I pushed myself to a point where I was ready to give up. It was like boot camp times fifty. I edit the videos too so I wasn’t sleeping at all. We kind of changed it up this year. It was a dark time for me so Ascension represents me coming out of that and finding the love for Hip-Hop again. I had to get off Twiter and Facebook and just wrote. Rel!g!on is a super producer as far as his beats and I’m really excited about people hearing it.
If you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out Jasiri’s classic ‘What if the Tea Party was Black?’
Check out this powerful and moving new video from Akala, for his track ‘Yours and My Children’. Shot on location in Rio’s favelas, the video is definitely a major step up from the average hip-hop vid. No bling, no phat cars, no bragging or bullshit; just regular scenes from the Brazilian hood, interspersed with clips from various live performances, all very slickly and professionally edited.
No doubt you’ve heard the track before, so I don’t need to tell you how deep it is. Akala kicks some of the realest knowledge, with breathtaking skill and passionate delivery. His simple message of unity is one that we need to take up! Here’s an excerpt of the lyrics:
Even the fact that I call myself black
Social conditioning and that’s a fact
The idea of races has no factual basis
It was made just to serve racists
To justify doing to some what couldn’t be done to others
But they all are all of our sons
BLack or white, all of our sons
Muslim, Christian, all of our sons
Look up in the sky, that’s all of our sun
Last time I checked, we only had one
So if some were inferior, others superior, based on exterior
Well then surely the sun would know and fall into line
It would rain on your crops and not mine
Air would prefer to inhabit your lungs
Food would prefer the taste of your tongue
If that’s not the case then nature’s declared
Despite what we say, the world’s in fact fairKids in Iraq, yours and my children
Kids in Iran, yours and my children
Afghanistan, yours and my children
Even Sudan, yours and my children
Kids in Brazil, yours and my children
Police drive by the favela and just kill dem
Spread the word! Let’s get the view count up and make sure the music industry knows Akala cannot be ignored.
Big ups to SB.TV for premiering the video.
Follow Akala on Twitter
Follow SB.TV on Twitter
Buy Akala’s latest album, DoubleThink, on iTunes
Read our review of the recent Dead Prez and Akala gig
Tupac Shakur
The son of a very well-known New York Black Panther, Afeni Shakur, Tupac was exposed to the ideas of black power and freedom from a very early age (his godfather was Geronimo Pratt, one of the leading Panthers and a long-term political prisoner). Nonetheless, unlike a lot of other ‘conscious’ hip-hop MCs, Pac was from the *street*. He didn’t go to college; he didn’t grow up in relative comfort. He grew up in the projects, and he always identified with the disenfranchised, disenchanted, impoverished young people he grew up with.
Pac grew in the aftermath of an intense political struggle in which many of his family’s friends and relatives had been killed or imprisoned. In her book ‘The War Before’, Safiya Bukhari (another New York Panther who was a close friend of Afeni’s) points out that everyone who came through this struggle was, to some extent, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. To see your friends die in shoot-outs; to operate ‘underground’; to go to prison; to suffer solitary confinement – all of these things have an impact on your psychological health. Afeni, like a number of other Panther veterans, became addicted to crack cocaine in the early 1980s. As a result, Tupac’s childhood was highly unpredictable, and the contradiction of his family’s Panther legacy and his own erratic, impoverished childhood is one of the main themes that defines his life and his music.
Tupac more than any other rapper bridges the generation gap between the black power generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the hip-hop generation of the 1980s onwards. He brings the Panther legacy to his music, but he does it in order to bring certain ideas to bear on the struggles of his generation, rather than just giving a history lesson. Unfortunately, once he hooked up with Death Row records in the later part of his career, his music took on a much less positive, much less revolutionary, much more gangsta aspect. However, his earlier albums stand out as some of the best works of political art in recent memory.
Here is the video to ‘Changes’, one of Pac’s most heartfelt and memorable songs, the lyrics for which contain some real depth and insight. The song is an indictment of the oppression of African people in the US, and a call to oppressed people to start working together and to stop killing each other.
Pac makes an important point that many seasoned politicians (even on the left) don’t properly understand, relating the situation in the Middle East to the situation in the ghettoes of the United States:
And still I see no changes, can’t a brother get a little peace?
There’s war in the streets and war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me
With a note of desperation, he points out that the most vibrant struggle of black people in the US to gain freedom and equality was struck down ruthlessly by the state:
It’s time to fight back, that’s what Huey [Newton] said
Two shots in the dark, now Huey’s dead
But the real message of the song is more optimistic: we need to stop doing what the oppressors want us to do, and we need to unite.
I got love for my brother, but we can never go nowhere
Unless we share with each other
We gotta start makin’ changes
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers
Tupac Amaru Shakur, RIP
Lowkey is on a serious roll at the moment – everything he is putting out is lyrically, musically and politically on point. The latest video from his forthcoming (and much-anticipated) album ‘Soundtrack to the Struggle’ is called ‘Terrorist?’, and it explores the true meanings of the concepts ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’.
Lowkey starts off by quoting the dictionary definitions as follows:
Terrorist: the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coersion.
Terror: violent or destructive acts such as bombing, committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.
He proceeds to compare some of the people that are labeled in the media as ‘terrorists’ (ie. Iraqis and others using primitive explosives against colonial domination) with the powerful states and corporations that are terrorising millions on a daily basis.
What’s the bigger threat to human society,
BAE Systems or home-made IEDs?
Remote controlled drones killing off human lives
Or man with home-made bomb committing suicide?
Although the ‘terrorist’ label has primarily been used to describe Muslims, particularly since the twin towers attack, Lowkey points out that resistance to imperialism isn’t limited to any one religion or racial group, and that all oppressed people are united by their opposition to the empire.
This is very basic
One nation in the world has over a thousand military bases.
They say it’s religion, when clearly it isn’t
It’s not just Muslims that oppose your imperialism.
Is Hugo Chavez a Muslim? Nah, I didn’t think so.
Is Castro a Muslim? Nah, I didn’t think so.
He brilliantly exposes the hypocrisy of western colonisers describing anybody as terrorists:
Lumumbah was democracy
Mossadeq was democracy
Allende was democracy
Hypocrisy, it bothers me
Call you terrorist if you don’t wanna be a colony
Refuse to bow down to a policy of robbery
The song is summed up by its beautiful, haunting chorus:
They’re calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
When they put it on me I tell them this
I’m all about peace and love.They’re calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
Insulting my intelligence
Oh how these people judge
All in all, another very powerful track from Lowkey, with excellent production by the ever-reliable Red Skull and a highly professional, innovative video by Global Faction. Please spread the word!
