AllHipHop.com Endorses Kevin Powell For Congress (Brooklyn)

DONATE $5 to Kevin’s campaign NOW at www.kevinpowell.net (click DONATE) “When you consider the intelligence and breadth of Kevin Powell’s writing and activism, you come to the conclusion that there may be no better spokesperson and representative for a generation that has too long been counted out.” —asha bandele An interesting thing happens in America […]

Meditations on Hip-Hop: Of Disposability, Death, and Destiny (Pt. III of III)

DESTINY A learning process might appear … for the crushed, the forbidden-to-be, the rejected, that would teach them that, through serious, just, determined, untiring struggle, it is possible to remake the world. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: The Continuum Publishing Co., 1994), p. 198. Must survive any how […]

Africa, The Next Throne of ‘Hip-Hop’

I’ve mentioned this story before because it was one of those experiences that always stays with you. In December 2009, I wrote the following in a column at AllHipHop.com: “In 1996, while serving as GM of Wu-Tang Management, I participated in a private meeting with executives from RCA Records. At a certain point they brought […]

How High Can Hip-Hop Go?

People have always smoked marijuana, for one reason or another.  Some people justifiable reasoning was religious/spiritual or medicinal, others used the drug-induced state to escape, some indulged to make stupidity seem gut busting hilarious, if not genius, while others just geeked and got the munchies.  I’m from the red light, beaded sectional dividers, burnt incense, […]

Meditations on Hip-Hop: Of Disposability, Death, and Destiny (Pt. II of III)

DEATH All deaths have causes … Corpses are cut open, explored, scanned, tested, until the cause is found: a blood clot, kidney failure, hemorrhage, heart arrest, lung collapse. We do not hear of people dying of mortality. They die only of individual causes … No post-mortem examination is considered complete until the individual cause has […]

The Renaissance of The Female MC: Ana Tijoux and Queen Yonasda

Renaissance – any new birth, re-birth or revival of art, thought, science, literature, or architecture. [(French for “rebirth”; Italian: Rinascimento, from ri- “again” and nascere “be born”)] Listening to the new albums from Ana Tijoux and Queen Yonasda made me think of Akinyele. I know what you’re thinking so let me explain. About 11 years […]

Meditations on Hip-Hop: Of Disposability, Death, and Destiny (Pt. I of III)

DISPOSABILITY   “As the social state is displaced by the market, a new kind of politics is emerging in which some lives, if not whole groups, are seen as disposable and redundant.” —Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 155-156. They lack the minerals and […]