Somebody sent this over to me today knowing that I’m a big Luckyiam fan, but I posted it because I’m feeling the entire track. Mils and Eekwol are siblings representing Canada’s Mils Productions. From what I could gather, The Gauntlet was a track from the duo’s ’07 album “The List,” and originally featured Stic.Man of Dead Prez. This new version features Luckyiam of the Living Legends crew.

Big ups to Jon at Vivid Imagery for sending this over. Kasha is a UK emcee and Black Rhyme is a track from his album “The Oracle.”

A little bit of that international shit for ya. The Afeeliated is a Norwegian hip-hop group. From their new album “Saving the City Vol 2.”

Super big ups for the homie BeatRoot for sending this over. I ain’t gonna lie though, when I saw that dude had just sent me a mixtape from some French hip-hop artists, I chuckled a little. But once I actually listened to the album, I realized that these cats got skillz. Fantastic Planet is a French hip-hop group who apparently teamed up with some U.S. emcees and turntablists to create this mixtape. Click below to download Fantastic Planet’s “Fantastic JJ Project” mixtape for FREE:

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The Maqusi Towers in Gaza City look a bit like US housing projects. The neighborhood consists of several tall apartment buildings grouped together in the northern part of town. It is also ground zero for Gaza’s growing Hip-Hop community. On a recent evening in one small but well-decorated apartment, a dozen rappers and their friends and families relaxed, danced, smoked flavored tobacco, and rapped the lyrics to some of their songs.

The occasion was a post-show celebration of the taping of Hip Hop Kom, an American Idol-type talent competition for Palestinian rappers. Fifteen acts from across Palestine performed on Thursday night, and the show was broadcast simultaneously in Gaza City and the West Bank city of Ramallah. Through the use of video conferencing and projection, each city could see and hear the performances happening in the other. Five groups from Gaza participated, and Gazawians came in first, third, and fourth place.

The Gaza City show was held in a small theatre in the Palestine Red Crescent building. Although only publicized by word of mouth, nearly 200 young people filled the theatre, loudly cheering for the rappers and breakdance crew who took the stage.

One of the organizers of the contest, a charismatic literature major named Ayman Meghames, is a minor celebrity here. Part of Gaza’s first Hip-Hop group — named PR: Palestinian Rapperz — Ayman dedicates his time to supporting and publicizing Gaza’s young music scene.

Armed with a ready smile, Ayman was seemingly everywhere at once that night. He was on stage introducing the acts, helping with technical difficulties, greeting friends, and coordinating with the West Bank organizers.

For Ayman, making music is a form of resistance to war and occupation, and also a tool to communicate the reality of life in Palestine. “Most of our lyrics are about the occupation,” he tells me. “Lately we’ve also started singing about the conflict between Hamas and Fatah. Any problem, it needs to be written about.” Rapper Chuck D, from the group Public Enemy, once called rap music the CNN for Black America. For Ayman and his friends, music is their weapon to break media silence. “Most of the world believes we are the terrorists,” he says. “And the media is closed to us, so we get our message out through Hip-Hop.”

One of the first acts to take the stage was a duo called Black Unit Band. Mohammed Wafy, one of the two singers, displays the innocent charm of a teen pop star as he jumps from the stage and into the audience. Tall and skinny with a shock of black hair, Mohammed is 18 and looks younger. Khaled Harara, the other singer (and Mohammed’s next door neighbor) is a few years older and several pounds heavier, but no less energetic on stage.

As the evening progressed, the energy in the room continued to rise. The next act featured six members from two combined groups (DA MCs, and RG, for Revolutionary Guys) now collectively called DARG Team. The crowd was up on their feet, many of them singing along as the performers displayed a range of lyrical stylings.

In Mohammed Wafy’s apartment, the perfomers waited anxiously for the results of the contest. The call came in on Ayman’s cel phone. Putting it on speaker, everyone listened as the results were announced: DARG team had come in first place, and Black Unit had placed third. There were no hurt feelings apparent for those that didn’t win — for these young performers, every victory is a shared victory. DARG members will now go on to Denmark to produce an album (if they can get out of Gaza).

Fadi Bakhet, a studious and slightly preppy looking Afro-Palestinian in wire-rimmed glasses, is DARG’s manager, and also the brother of one of the members. As the night continued, the gathering moved to his apartment. They celebrated the successful show, which also fell on the last day of exams for many students, and the laughing and conversation continued late into the night. The next day was hot and sunny, and thousands of Gazawians gathered on the beach to swim and relax by the Mediterranean.

These stories may seem incongruent with much of the international reporting about Gaza and the Hamas government. But it is exactly for this reason that they should be told.

If you follow the reporting on Palestine in the US media, you may imagine a fundamentalist state. Hamas-stan, as at least one Israeli commentator has called it. You may imagine a nation of terrorists, where women are oppressed and men launch rockets. But perhaps when we learn that Palestinian families swim on Friday afternoons, that they study literature in the day and rap about imprisoned friends at night, we can rethink the US’ unquestioning support for Israeli aggression against this almost entirely defenseless population.

Yesterday, I visited a journalism class at the Islamic University, taught by Rami Almeghari. The students had many questions, but one young woman’s words in particular stayed with me. “What can we do to reach people in America and tell them how things really are here,” she asked. “How can we get them to listen, and to see?”

Source:
Article written by Jordan Flaherty for Dissident Voice

The United Nations has launched a trust fund to build a permanent memorial for victims of slavery, and appointed entrepreneur and hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons as a Goodwill Ambassador to promote the project.

A 2007 General Assembly resolution designated 25 March as an annual day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and called for a permanent memorial to be erected at UN Headquarters to acknowledge the tragedy and consider the legacy of slavery.

“We hope to encourage broad study of the causes and lessons of the 400-year slave trade. We want to mobilize educational institutions and civil society to discuss the threat of intolerance from which no society is immune,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message to the launch ceremony, read out by Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information Kiyo Akasaka.

Mr. Simmons told reporters his role would be to increase awareness, especially among young persons, of the history of slavery, its lasting impact, and current slavery issues.

“It’s humbling to be invited to join the UN community in this role as Goodwill Ambassador. In recognizing the past, we understand the stakes in ensuring that something as devastating to the human condition as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade will never happen again,” he said.

“My life’s commitment is to be of service to the empowerment of young people living in struggle, who undoubtedly have been effected by this legacy.”

The memorial, projected to cost $3.5 million, is expected to be completed by 2012.

Source:
UN News Center

Written by Gary Lapon, Northampton, MA – A few weeks ago, I saw DAM perform at Hampshire College, where they expressed solidarity with Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine for pushing their college to divest from the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

The show was amazing, as DAM brought an energy and achieved a synthesis between MC and audience that gave weight to their statement: “Hip Hop is not dead. It is alive in Palestine.”

I picked up a copy of Slingshot Hip Hop at the show, and have since watched it several times. It is a complex film that holds important lessons and inspiration for those who are the targets and opponents of oppression and repression.

At one point early in the film Tamer Nafar of DAM discusses the decisive influence of Tupac Shakur’s video “Holla If Ya Hear Me,” a stark look at issues such as police brutality, gun violence, racism and poverty. Nafar, although at that time unable to understand the lyrics, felt as though the video was filmed in Lyd, his home.

Later in the film, Nafar explains that the worse the conditions facing an MC, the more powerful their art, and that Hip Hop is a defiant response to oppression and a tool for channeling one’s anger. Holding a copy of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Nafar says, “Here there is a fear of an Arab…nation.”

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DIGGING DEEPER in the crates (I’d recommend Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop as a great place to start), the similarities between the South Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop in the late 1970s, and Palestine, the home of its exciting resurgence in a form that is anything but co-opted, are striking.

Slingshot Hip Hop shows the home demolitions by Israeli bulldozers in Arab areas of Palestine to terrorize Palestinians and make room for Israeli settlers.

In the early 1960s, New York City bulldozers cleared whole neighborhoods and displaced thousands in the predominately Black and Puerto Rican South Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Several artists in the film cite the Second Intifada as a defining moment in their lives that gave birth to or at least shaped and inspired their work today. The Intifada, an uprising that began in 2000 in response to Ariel Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque but really marked a popular rejection of the failed Oslo strategy of negotiation and collaboration with Israel, was a mass struggle that utilized a diversity of tactics to resist the Israeli occupation.

In 1977, in the midst of a crippling recession, a blackout in New York City set off rioting and “looting” that was especially intense in poor Black and Latino sections of the city, including the South Bronx. Although not nearly as conscious or defined in purpose as the Second Intifada, the riots were political: they were an expression of the just rage of a people impoverished, brutalized by police, oppressed and displaced.

Just as the Second Intifada was an expression of frustration with Arafat’s failed strategy to win liberation through negotiation, the 1977 riots were an expression of frustration with the failure of the movements of the 1960s and ’70s to provide a solution to the injustice faced by Blacks and Latinos in the inner-cities of the North.

The Second Intifada provided DAM with the political material to compose their breakout 2001 single “Meen Erhabe?” (“Who’s the Terrorist?”), which laid the foundation for political Palestinian hip hop and was downloaded over 1 million times.

The “looting” of 1977 provided many Hip Hop artists with the physical material, sound equipment and turntables, to develop and take the culture “all city” and beyond.

If these connections are surprising, consider that the same government whose police occupy the South Bronx funds Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Martin Luther King Jr. said during Vietnam that bombs dropped overseas explode at home. They still do.

The fact that DAM is playing to packed crowds in the U.S. and Slingshot Hip Hop is opening the eyes of young people to the injustice faced by Palestinians is a reason to be hopeful, as is the outbreak of protest here and around the world in response to Israel’s recent slaughter in Gaza, and the growth of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in its wake.

Just as hip hop is a means to channel anger, we must channel that hope back into the struggle, because if we’re ever going to get freedom here in the U.S., Palestinians need to win freedom in their country.

Our oppressors understand this, hence the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel. It’s time for the oppressed and exploited in Palestine, the U.S., and everywhere else form our own “special relationship.”

Source:
SocialistWorker.org

This is an interesting interview/performance from Cuban hip-hop group Anonimo Consejo, which was filmed for a Worldfocus news story “Social, economic change is in the air in post-Fidel Cuba.”

This is a video called “Word Wars,” part of a news report about hip-hop in Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem put together by John Pendygraft of the St. Petersburg Times.

My bad, the scavengers at CBS News are going to make you watch an ad first.