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.

An accompanying video shows clips from Ms. Bhutto’s political life and scenes from her funeral, and ends with pictures from the family album. The song, I Would Take the Pain Away, has been airing on Pakistani state television and posted to YouTube. Ms. Bhutto’s three children, Bilawal, Bakhtawar and Aseefa, have spoken very little about the assassination of their mother, who was killed in December of 2007 as she campaigned for a third term as prime minister.

Bilawal, now 20, studies at Oxford University, while Aseefa is still in grade school in Dubai. Bakhtawar is a student at Edinburgh University in Scotland. The three make visits to Pakistan, where their father, Asif Zardari, is now President, appearing occasionally at official events, most recently for the first anniversary of Ms. Bhutto’s death.

Before her death, Ms. Bhutto reportedly used her contacts to introduce her daughter to rap superstar Sean Combs, known by his stage names Puff Daddy, P. Diddy and Diddy.

“She has a poetic side to herself,” Farhatullah Babar, a long-time aide to Ms. Bhutto, said of Bakhtawar. “It’s just that a young daughter of a slain mother felt like doing this.”

The Pakistan Peoples Party, which Ms. Bhutto led until her death, made clear, however, that Bakhtawar did not plan to follow a career in music. She has not ruled out following her mother and grandfather into the country’s tumultuous politics. Like other South Asian countries, politics in Pakistan is dominated by dynasties, and Bakhtawar reminds listeners that her grandfather and two uncles were also murdered.

While Ms. Bhutto was alive her children played no political role. Within days of her death, Bilawal was made chairman of the party, at the suggestion of his father. In practice, Mr. Zardari, who became co-chairman, runs party affairs.

Source:
Globe and Mail

Their first CD “Panabay Twist” is a lesson in the events that have shaped the Latin American country that celebrated its 105th year of independence yesterday. One of the most significant was the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama City to oust military dictator Manuel Noriega — an event recalled in Los Rakas’ song “Invasion of Panama 1989.”

The song was inspired by the invasion of Iraq, to help “open people’s eyes instead of them believing propaganda and everything they see on TV,” said Bethancourt, better known as Rico.

Now in their early 20s, the duo was toddlers during the 1989 invasion. But the ensuing violence became as much a part of their lives and music as growing up in East Oakland.

“Even though Panama is a third-world country, you have the same issues here,” Bethancourt said. Police harassment, education disparities and racial discrimination, for starters, he said, as though he were checking off items on a long list.

“You just want it to get better. So you write about it.”

Both countries share a legacy of slavery and racism, which runs just below the surface in Panama. “Bettering the race” means whitening it in Panama, Bethancourt said. “More people should know about our race. Educate yourself.”

“About what went down,” Dominguez added to the thought, instinctively duplicating the same back-and-forth the duo creates on stage.

While performing, the two dance past each other across the stage, bantering and moving to the cross-pollinated music that blends Caribbean beats with hip-hop. The music also is a blend of their temperaments. Dominguez, who goes by the nickname Dun Dun, said his exposure at 14, when he moved to Oakland, to the history of the Black Panthers, African culture and slavery was a radical eye-opener to Panama’s history.

“When you learn about the roots, what happened with the slave trade you get angry,” Dominguez said, his words marked by the Caribbean-influenced Spanish he speaks more comfortably than English.

That anger inspired his early music as a student at Oakland High School. But it wasn’t until November 2005 that the two friends started rapping together. Dominguez was still in what he called his “angry stage,” while Bethancourt was into Hyphy, a Bay Area hip-hop cultural movement. The first song they performed together was called “Bounce.” “Mi Barrio” followed and then three years ago they produced “Panabay Twist,” a CD named for the blending of Bay Area influence with Panamanian heritage.

Indeed, their style is like a musical “melting pot” infused with young Panamanian rappers such as Nando Boom, El Rookie and El General with generous helpings of salsa and dance hall all swimming in a broth of hip-hop, reminiscent of the likes of E-40, Tupac Shakur, Movado and Oakland’s Zion I.

While Los Rakas has stacked up numerous performances at big-name venues, the group is something of an oddity in the East Bay, which doesn’t have the sizable Caribbean community of New York, Washington, D.C., or Florida. “We get attention fast there, though,” Dominguez said.

Latinos here look at their dark skin and wonder why they speak Spanish, whereas African-Americans wonder why they aren’t rapping in English, he said. So they start with something familiar for Bay Area audiences before mixing in the Caribbean as they progress.

They’ve branched out musically, experimenting with different genres and adding catchier hooks along the lines of the style Bethancourt picked up during a visit to Puerto Rico. “We keep it street but can flip to commercial,” he said. “It’s whatever we’re feeling.”

They now also have a regular DJ — DJ Leydis — who is from Cuba and helps elevate the music to “a whole other level,” Bethancourt said. “She puts the cherry on top of the Oreo milkshake.”

They are working on their second mix tape that traces dance hall music from the 1980s to current styles. Called “La Tanda del Bus,” the CD is named for the public vehicles that run through Panama City, decorated with themes according to the route, each with its own custom-made mix tapes — hence the title “theme of the bus.”

They also are trying their hand at running their own production company, Raka LP. It fits in with their identity as rakas, city slang for people from the ghetto who carry a stigma they are trying to remove.

“It’s working. We turned it into a positive thing,” Dominguez said. “Before it was an insult. Now people say ‘I’m a raka.’”

Source:
Inside Bay Area

Common and Kitwana will highlight the day’s events with their presentation at 2 p.m. in Gemmell Student Complex. A panel program will close the activities at 7 p.m. also in the Gemmell Student Complex. Kitwana, in addition to being the co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention is the author of “The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.” He is currently an artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago.

Last summer he was called as an expert witness by the ACLU in the case of a junior high school student in Pennsylvania who was expelled for his rap lyrics. His expert testimony was referenced in the judge’s ruling, which allowed the student to return to school.

The former editor of national top-selling music magazine ‘The Source,” Kitwana’s writings have appeared in the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, Savoy and the Progressive. He has taught in the English departments at Texas Southern University and University of Houston Downtown. He’s also been an adjunct professor in the political science department at Kent State University, where he taught a course “The Politics of the Hip-Hop Generation.”

Kitwana has been the editorial director of Third World Press, a consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and for the last decade since the publication of his first book, “The Rap on Gangsta Rap,” has lectured on hip-hop and youth culture at colleges and universities across the country, including Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, and Stanford University.

His book, “Hip-Hop Generation,” has been adopted as a course book in over 100 college classrooms in a variety of disciplines from sociology, history and Black studies to anthropology, music, and political science. He holds masters degrees in English and education from the University of Rochester. “Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America,” is his most recent book.

Hip-Hop artist Common is recognized for his emphasis on family values and departure from the “gansta rap” material and negative posturing sometimes found in popular hip hop or rap lyrics and videos. Born Lonnie Rashid Lynn in 1973, he was raised in Chicago, Ill., becoming the first widely hailed MC to emerge from that area. Under the name Common Sense he signed with Relativity Records in 1991.

He released “Can I Borrow A Dollar” in 1992 and “Resurrection” in 1994, the same year he was forced to abbreviate his name to Common due to a lawsuit by an Orange County-based reggae group called Common Sense.

“Resurrection” commented on the stagnant state of hip-hop and rap with the single, “i used to love h.e.r.” It created discussion within the hip-hop/rap realm, drew attention to his talent, and prompted a lawsuit by rapper Ice Cube, who felt he was maligned in the song. The lawsuit did not end favorably for Common, and litigation slowed the production of “Resurrection.”

Three years later he released “One Day It’ll All Make Sense,” which included a roster of rap and hip-hop’s most talented artists. One of the singles, “Retrospect For Life,” recorded by Common and Lauryn Hill of the Fugees, dealt with the topic of abortion.

Common was in the forefront of an unprecedented wave of family values in the hip-hop community in 1998, the same year he was the headline act for the Elements of Hip-Hop tour. His contributions featured his own father, Lonnie, on a single titled “Pop’s Rap,” an apology from his father for not always being there; and a video of his single “Rap City ” on the BET network told the story of a young black man who decided to do the right thing by his pregnant girlfriend.

Other noted rappers such as Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J, and Coolio turned to the joys of fatherhood and marriage in their material, and Common was among those ushering in a new lyrical and spiritual trend toward family values and adulthood.

Kitwana and Common are also part of the 2008-09 Clarion University Martin Luther King Jr. Speaker Series.

The hip-hop activities will begin on Oct. 16 with a Hip-Hop Arts Exhibit in Marwick-Boyd Fine Arts Building.

The day-long events begin at 8:30 a.m. with a radio broadcast in the Gemmell Rotunda. book/CD signings and sales will also be held in the rotunda beginning at 11 a.m.

Two tracks will be run, a general schedule and one for educators. Teachers registering for the educator’s workshop will receive three Act 48 hours. High school students will also be taken on a campus tours and will participate in discussion groups led by Clarion University students.

Source:
Clarion University Press