Monday, August 4th, 2008

Bakari Kitwana On Luda & Obama

Bakari Kitwana on Luda-Obama. A worthy read:

“Obama will likely weather this storm even easier than the previous ones. But what the Ludacris controversy reveals for the hip-hop activist community is much more profound: the baggage presented by hip-hop’s public image compromises the hip-hop activist community’s attempts to place its issues on the national agenda.”

posted by Jeff Chang @ 8:53 am | 3 Comments

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Luda Could Use Some Education

The hum on the opening day at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention was that Ludacris had played himself. Badly.

Green Party vice presidential candidate Rosa Clemente put it best, “I have no love for Hillary’s politics and what it’s done to our folks, but I could feel her going through all the stuff she’s had to go through as a woman.”

Rap can say whatever it wants, and right now it wants to talk about the elections. That’s cool.

But Ludacris seemed to want to reduce serious politics to stale old battle rhymes. Come on, man. You got a degree from Georgia State. Rap deserves more than that.

We know that these days it’s gangsta to be political. But if you really want to battle on that level, step up your game, else you’ll just become another tool for the right-wing talk-show circuit.

Shoot, even Jeezy came with it when it was his turn.

Oddly enough, all this came on a day that the National Hip-Hop Political Convention focused on the educational possibilities of hip-hop. Hip-hop artists, teachers, professors, grad students, folks from the Hip-Hop Think Tank, and not a few young heads from the street came to UNLV yesterday to get into the ability of hip-hop to open minds.

Among the talks, rapper Asheru presented curriculum he had put together, using hip-hop songs by Nas, Common, Lauryn Hill, and even his own work for The Boondocks. He showed how you could take one song–say Mos Def’s “New World Water”–and break it down for english teachers, social studies teachers, and science teachers, using it to teach lessons about everything from poetry to hydrology. All of this was news we could use.

Listening, Luda?

As Marc Lamont Hill put it in his rousing closing address yesterday re: Lupe, right now is no time to dumb it down.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 7:53 am | 4 Comments

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