This was a panel convened by Words, Beats and Life in 2012. “This panel seeks to highlight what happens when hip-hop is the primary vehicle to enact the kind of changes it was created to make and what happens when people often outside the community and in some case from within it drive the trajectory…
Read moreAfrikan Education and the On-Going Crisis of Culture and Consciousness
What Is “Hip-Hop Activism”? w Bakari Kitwana
Bakari Kitwana joined us this week for a “debate” on the meaning of “hip-hop activism.” What is “hip-hop” as a community, a generation and what is this “hip-hop activism” leading us toward? To which political genealogy is that community attempting to connect, extend, exemplify? What is the ideology of this community and what methods is it…
Read moreHip-Hop and the Green Party: Jared Ball and Rosa Clemente Were Right by Shamako Noble
“In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.” -W.E.B. Du-Bois “The Green…
Read moreArtists, Scholars & Radio Professionals Weigh in on Radio Politics
FAAN Mail is interviewing independent hip hop artists, radio industry professionals and media scholars about radio play. These testimonies will inform a list of recommendations that we will share with our community, local radio stations and execs from Clear Channel and Radio One, two companies that own the majority of urban radio stations in the…
Read moreA Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X
Rather than view Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention as “a definitive work,” as some have called it, I, along with many others, believe Marable has left us a severely flawed biography. A Life of Reinvention is a contradictory political reshaping and distortion – a lie really – of the life and times of Malcolm X….
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