make rich man's world moral technique well thank you very much for having me on the show up where we were going to get to that just as i can appreciate you being here welcome once again to the radical imagination religious leaders law enforcement officials moralist the mainstream media and numerous others campaigns most famously the one by tipper gore the wife of the former vice president al gore has focused on trying to clean up rap lyrics to restrict children's access to explicit material which they say encourages a climate of glamorize violence in america and can be blamed for much gun violence street killings and drive by shootings in the country rap music through its music and lyrics and macho thuggish posturing is seen by them as one of the major causes of violence in a generally o control violent american society while acknowledging some of the criminality at the margins of the industry rap as a whole is largely a response to the often desperately grim and violent social conditions inner city residents face it's not a spur to the violence in itself it's a reaction to an institutional and structurally violent fear based larger culture that produces a perpetuate a militaristic worldview as sister soldier put it in one thousand nine hundred two the reason why rap is under attack is is because it exposes all the contradictions in american culture what started out as an underground art form has become a vehicle to expose a lot of critical is genes that are not usually discussed in american politics the problem here is that the white house and wannabes like bill clinton represent a political system that never intends to deal with inner city urban chaos we're honored to have in the radical magination today one of the giants of the genre a deeply respected and committed militant socially conscious political rapper his artistry embodies what cornel west calls radical love and a prophetic fire speaking truth to power letting suffering in misery speak fostering a love for the stranger and the other in the forefront of helping to bring about a world where justice is what love looks like in public he's a revolutionary calmer dear friend and on top of that we share a birthday cake doesn't get any better than that so welcome a moral technique phillippi cornell to the radical imagination inc you very much for have it's great to have you here but to have your so for our audience let's let's start with some of the basics here in terms of rap music and we're going to play a couple excerpts and does a few minutes catches clay and and others offering some of the that hip hop it in invented anything it that it reinvented everything in that it took the broken turntable that we found in the garbage and that we we we started cutting and mixing with it that we decided to explore the written word in a way in which it wasn't really explored before look we have tons of songs of profound lyrics in every genre but they're limited by the bar capacity of how much they can actually say so in hip hop you actually have a very very large amount of material that you can place into a sixteen to twenty four bar format and then devitt divided by how long this song is going to be even if you go to something shorter like a twelve bar format right you can still get about let's say thirty seconds to thirty five seconds depending on to be p m s of what you're saying to get across to people i guess what i'm trying to say is that you're allowed to use more words you're allowed to say more you're allowed to to function by critiquing a society which basically wrote you off which was actually hip hop's response to it were the children of the civil rights generation and in that sense we feel the sense of abandonment not just from america but from the elders of the civil rights movement themselves and i'll just make this particular point that what our problem was and especially in harlem because we felt like a lot of people criminalized hip hop they were calling black audit this was like black church people latino church people they were like oh you people are the n word you're a disgrace to race and i'm saying to myself wait a minute you had all the patients in the world to let down south white people spit on you so you could sit in a same counter crack eggs on your face sick the dogs on you spray the hoses and then after the civil rights movement what everyone went back to their rich churches and said i don't want those pictures in my neighborhood right you had all the patience for that which i'm going to have the patience for in one thousand nine hundred eighteen year old ice cube to sit down and talk with them and that's why i tell people that i don't necessarily agree with everything that fabric on would say but his approach to us is very different and other leaders like him their approach was to say look when you talk about the things that you're talking about understand the words you using when you individual by the name of dr john henrik clarke who was a great historian and his his work is something that permeated and also gave direction to the idea that we were the children of the civil rights movement that felt abandoned by it therefore we grew up more with the black panther mentality where as our parents and our older brothers and sisters wanted to be down what america i want to be down i want the same rights i guess the black panther generation was like nah fuck this country if it doesn't want to give me what i want what  with king and the nonviolence of that i don't think it was just as simple as that because we've also had to fix the example of malcolm x and destruction of those two particular figures leaving a power vacuum within that framework i think it was more of a rebellion against what we thought were the parameters of revolution why are we allowing racist people in the white house to tell us how we can rebel what can we repel right that any of the other generals who napoleon faced tell him we're going to we're to show up at the battlefield at ten am we'll see you there and the polian has cavalry ready at four am running to tear their camp cutting heads off we don't need to tell you we don't need you to tell us how or what's an acceptable way for us to rebel against the most inhumane oppression that these people have purposely so you found out the only way and this was now again you were you you were aware of the sixty's and some of the lessons there but the music itself begins to what about if you think that harlem was messed up in the eighty's and ninety's i always tell people because i went there not that this place is crazy but at the same time it was the epicenter of culture however people were like yo if you think harlem is bad now then imagine harlem in the the heroin crisis hit really hard like post vietnam broken homes ok and the gang violence associated with that at that level even farther back thirty forty years earlier than that harlem was richer than the upper east side when everybody the little one live in that smelly downtown area whatever into their peers in the street they want to live up in harlem where the fancy houses are where these people from all over the world were all over the world from the middle east from eastern europe from from latin america from asia people were coming and saying oh i want to design a gorgeous house or when you see the architecture itself very different very different than the rest of the snobby city so harlem to me was like this place where everyone had competence specifically it became a black america as well for people coming out of the south during the eight lead eight hundred and i felt like you know this is in many ways even though it must play different and i'm not trying to send anybody by saying it's what it must've felt like you were immigrating to a new country if you coming out the deep south and you coming up here to her during that particular time you must've felt like you was going from one country to another so therefore there's always been that sense that america is several countries bunched into one hip hop is one of the first places where we've talked about these day when all of our experience is so different as rappers coming out of different places and yet they're the same in the sense of oppression in the say sense of people trying to destroy our voice give us a little more a concept here of the country contacts you plug so it's all about the holland renaissance that's one thing which is the place that i actually came to because at that particular time obviously after this is the the new harlem renaissance what they thought would be the new renaissance but the new harlem renaissance to be honest jim is a scam the new harlem renaissance that's going on up there is not is not for the beautification of that particular area it's a combination of developers columbia university and a lot of other people that have decided to create things like a fake manhattanville community group and all these individuals to come in and advise that they should have more power and more control and yet they're a charity organization officially which causes a lot of like problems in the community at first and now their strategy is just to pay people off you know and i think that over the years we saw that as harlem residents people coming in and out and it's a metaphor for the culture as well as hip hop culture we've seen people come and go they come and try to use the culture for whatever it hundred sixty four i am the greatest which has been called one of the first attempts at hip hop so let's let's have the cash play here i am the greatest so the catch is kate clay soon to be muhammad ali influenced by malcolm x by deep south culture by yes by the does louis lie other other games that people played i mean i think that the aftermath of slavery what was it that they were doing by coming up with this stuff and i've discovered something we talked about this break we're going to hear that during the middle passage which is the name of an album i'm working on i discovered that colonization  also destroyed thousands and thousands of indigenous and african instruments and that even if you go as far back as the destruction of the temple by the babylonians they destroyed the hebrews musical instruments a lot of the idea of colonization destruction genocide conquest is based off of not just taking someone's land and their person but taking their culture taking who they are torture doesn't just hurt you it changes you as an individual and therefore these people live in a tortured society because their music was taken away from them so when i hear people say these condescending things about people of color other musical people you know it's that we're trying to reclaim things are part of where we come up with the idea of sampling of taking music from other places we're trying to recreate these rhythms and these songs and these ideas that are somewhere in our head we've saying these songs for what if the songs about how to be a good father what are the songs about how to stay away from addiction what if the what if the rhythm resembles something that says no we can never we have to address depression all of these things that we never talked about we don't know what that music's about and yes i'm not sitting here trying to reach and say that we had every single answer in the world right most certainly melodies are not just pieces of music they're also things that inspire people to action and they actually and have all there is discussion and they also get along with a lot of words we don't know what the words to the music were let alone the instruments that were destroyed that's what i'm saying we we have the basic foundation of what they may or may not look like you know i told you that my father had gifted me a series of books one of them was musical instruments of the indigenous people of what is now the dominican republic another one was a book about peruvian instruments that were destroyed by the spaniards most specifically bone flutes but if we're taking it that far back there's something humbling that we have to discuss about that human beings didn't invent music and when i say that people get confused they say technique are you going off on some conspiracy theory yet i've had three conspiracy theories one was that the iraq war was had bone flutes had primitive drums and whether you like it or not that's music because if you're going to tell me that spontaneous rhythm spontaneous melodies and harmonies that people come up with that they sing along with aren't music then you're telling me jazz isn't music you tell me all forms of of of kind of version expression that come together in a free style format should be legitimate and that is legitimate and these people did craft their own instruments stuff that we look at today and we say oh this where do you think we got the idea for a flute from our imagination or more likely from a sperm subspecies of human beings that we came in contact with two hundred thousand years ago or so and he bounces off the incredibly hostile environment that we're facing is actually a very funny that was done on an album by dr dre which is a classic record in hip hop called the chronic where he goes hey it's d's and everyone's like these that everyone laughs so i can tell it's not i might say dr stole that from there but obviously if you hear it the funkadelic inspiration that then comes after music like that comes from there the idea that you're making jokes that are in a record in a skit in the middle of a song comes from there it definitely shows that there is a long lineage that kind of of that kind of history and music and i think one thing i learned especially from people about the balance of hip hop the balance of the idea of the green and the truth teller and also the party mc there was always kind of this this symbiotic relationship that they shared in the beginning of hip hop but then towards the commercialization era in the ninety's the green slowly began to see themselves dwindle towards the end of that decade and the party mc kind of dominated the entire spear and what i was told and explained to is that it's not that one should exist without the other both are necessary songs that work about like surviving those times on a plantation these weren't songs that were saying because people like their condition there was songs that were saying to get people to the day to imagine a new world so if someone's rapping about a car they don't have jim or a life they don't live it's kind of saying like oh man i wish i had this i wish i could get  plantation that i work at every other day and then they would agree it's the truth tellers among the people who made music and who who spoke in riddles and they made poetry and played a game with the dozens when they talk about your mama your mama so fat this really they were talking about the master overseer but they wouldn't they couldn't say that so they would say your mama instead so put on all massa in this in this instance it shows the kind of dynamic that existed that doesn't exist as now because there isn't that same balance in the culture between agreat the truth teller and the party mc and i'm not saying that one is more important the other obvious well or my mind in my mind obviously degree art is more important but i prevented vision there has to be a balance of that in my mind it's not that i as a as but an underground artist people automatically assume that i hate everything that's commercial i don't necessarily do obviously if we look there in the eighty's and ninety's there's so much music that if you read the it's morally bankrupt but at the same time you're also talking about people who lived in a condition that they're describing they're not necessarily saying i want to do that they're talking about what's already happened and i can only link that to punk rock and rock music where the people use devil imagery and satan imagery and you think are these people satan worshippers and then you look into what they're saying and they're not saying that i worship the devil they're saying you worship the devil by worshipping this material is a large red house or a weed is good you you you're the one worshipping a golden calf only they're like our hero cracking running around the city expressing free love or whatever i mean not that those people didn't have their dysfunction as well but the whole point they were trying to make is in showcasing this devilishly imagery i'm giving a mirror to the society where marital rape wasn't even on the books until late in the twentieth century oh my god until until the jim crow laws and martin luther king's birthday i mean this is something that was voted down in the eighty's and ninety's and we're talking about people that make excuses for that kind of bigotry without just explaining and accepting that that's still where your estimation very much so and that when we talk about the evolution of human beings how we grow to six thing or how we learn not to  interpret emotions and into violence no so how much have we really evolved in a hundred thousand years you know if we took all the human beings that are in new york city pick them up took them to another area and drop them off or they do anything different in the people there where they invent a new glorious society ten thousand years ago that would create a futuristic society now or where they end up sleeping in the same pig shit mud that people were doing back then it just goes to show that time isn't linear we're not going just in upstream we're going  are gone how many of our songs have been washed away how many of our dreams have been tooken by the sea and in this case the sea being a metaphor for an imperialist system for people trying to take away from your culture and i think the  question is often over intellectualized instead of just talking about the base the kind of base in humanity that would cause that to happen and i think part of that comes conversation is exposing evil but it doesn't come in in a blood curdling format that sometimes it comes in the most official capacity that the people who killed the most people and do the most things wrong jim they're not the ones breaking rules they're the following orders the so called best deny that people think that oh the state know the state is the biggest terrorist because it's operated as a terrorist organization several states have done it over the years going back thousands of years so it's not something brand new and i also think that if we're talking about music in terms of a fighting organization and a revolutionary art then we have to understand that if if language is criminalized then they're going to say that the things that they've done that are legitimately terrorist distinct things aren't terrorism and talking about these things is terrorism in the same way that you know someone who now complains about racism the right wing wants to paint them as a racist instead of the person who was at the very least you know racially insensitive with the things that they say and talking about it will go absolutely absolutely but when you talk about the lyrics and again the language should say using wood says is going to be seen by some as obscene but what does this think vision that you're talking about speaking truth to power it's a for shock value or what is that what is that about i appreciate that because it brings up something else that when i first came out with the album that i had revolutionary volume two i had a song called the fourth branch where i talked about the war in iraq and how the media basically acted as a fourth branch of the government that's what i called the fourth branch because they manipulated people's minds into this so that not to say that you can't get  information from people that are there are legitimate journalists out there and i don't believe that every single of those people are boy i think some people are legitimately out there trying to break stories but i think that overall when i made that song people come up to me and they'd be like you know i really like your music but some of the cursing is wrong so when i started doing as i started taking pictures or asking my friends were journalists out there in a field to take me pictures of what was going on in iraq i said these people they don't watch b there's a picture that i had posted up and it was literally of a of a charred body and a guy had scrawled on it so i said this picture to my mother because if i hadn't she wouldn't understand what war was like right so i got these person i said you know send me some pictures i said i want to see what the war looks like i have to see this so when i got these pictures i was horrified i was like you know these are charred kids bodies what the hell is going on out there and i i would keep like maybe not all of them like one of them around me and when i would have an interview or an argument with someone that i knew was going to bring of their point i would say what are you more offended by the fact that i said this is fucking horrible or actually this which is going horrible  is the person would at that point i've never really had a positive comeback from somebody from there because they already know that they work themselves into like a verbal trap but i'm not saying that this is a debate tactic that i just throw in people's faces no i'm saying that when i have a conversation with someone that i know is specifically angry about the language and it's usually because they come from a little bit more of a religious background and or maybe a little stuffy are not used to hearing it and i tell them what are we more incited by that's exact same artistic context to describe someone else's music about how that was a necessity in the form to be able to question it that there's no such thing as freedom unless the president can be arrested unless the people in the highest offices of power can be held to accountability as if they do they never are in many cases but that's the whole point let's say we're two people and one of us is known for apologizing all the time and one of us is known for never apologizing it's not that the person that's known for never apologizing is right more often than me it's that they've just never apologized as much no individual is more right or more wrong than other individuals if they're like a good person most normal people man they messed up but it was a question of how they choose to interpret that so in this case we're talking about how we choose to interpret someone struggle for freedom or someone as if it's obscene as if we have to meet some kind of moral standard to fight back the the cause that we are affected by right wasn't given to us by a moral standard it wasn't pushed through through morals it was pushed through by brute force for us and by so therefore can we free ourselves by asking the people who in slave dust for freedom and by fighting by their rules that the question do you resort to the same sort of  give you money when they take your land they take your land say wouldn't you and your family can get the hell out or you can get run over by a bulldozer we're playing what you would do it just like they do it over there we're playing with you and the reality is that these people god bless their hearts in the very beginning the man told me straight up because yes we had a vision we had a force we had a unified idea but asked them pretty straightforward question i said you know is selling drugs and being involved with drug cartels is that part of the revolution is that it isn't that  revolution itself that that's what corrupts everything and the guy was actually really honest when he spoke back to me he goes no you're right that that is a corruption of revolutionary ideals but we're still doing it but he's but he said this jim we can't sponsor in a revolution we ran into the economic reality of a revolution and we can't sponsor a revolution with bookstores and bake sales and hip hop shows and he was absolutely right when you look at what is occurring in the world you find a gigantic kind of surplus of information that's now just being flooded out because that's the resort tactic that people are the system goes to when people find out damaging information about it then now we have the overflow of in from a lower lower the data so people want to just say oh we want to make the argument muddy as much as we can in the end of being able to have a really precise and definitive argument about whether these things in some way shape or form that that is that acceptable how could that possibly be so coming from it from from that perspective i saw their struggle and what they were doing even though sure a lot of that city like a lot of what's going down there is a serious inhumanity like i was there when the government and them were negotiating a stoppage of child soldiers terry death squads from the right wing will be a bad child soldiers were used and the left wing had been using people that were obviously on thirteen fourteen year old kids as well so they wanted these things to be divided gleaming about where they were they wanted them the negotiation center they'd sent like a troop of young cadets into the jungle and the other people saw this as a breach of that agreement and those people were killed and i thought about it and i was like wow and when i got out of the of the hotel and i was going to the show i saw all the soldiers that were there and you know since they made the truth here these were kids but they were kids jim wright talk about seventeen eighteen year old kids holding weapons and i thought about it and i was like this is the same in every country they want the youngest most impressionable people to fight for them right to fight for what they have right and yet they leave them out easy ride osha laws and they leave them out of there afterwards you know we talk about veterans so much in this country how come they don't have health care for life how come we don't we're not we're not withstanding for what is happening also a lot of all recently with this group of people sorry if you can see the last this is the green card veterans so i want to give them a thought about that  these are people who served their country many of them jim in multiple theaters of war in iraq and afghanistan and the joint ventures for iraq pieces are no no no the totally different thing ok greencard veterans jim these are people who are not  promised citizenship during the bush administration and some of them in the obama administration because like you and i both know the war didn't stop when obama came into office but the reality is that for very small infractions and i know what the immediate response is going to be because i've had this debate before the majority in the vast majority meaning like technically above ninety some odd eighty ninety eight percent of these people are not deported for violent crime they're not deported for rape or murder so before you try to use that hook no it's i repeat that they were not granted citizenship those that were essential american people the green card veterans those that were actually granted citizenship many of them when they were in iraq they were brought to baghdad to then  be made iraqi citizens and then given asylum into the united states to become an american citizen that way why jim because the american government didn't want to set a precedent of giving central american people asylum which leads us to the migrant caravan issue that we face now where the united states has definitively destabilized several central american countries and its legal handlers are now absolutely including time douras with the help of the clinton law firm but that is something that people don't necessarily bring up in the greater span  is these are the type of things that i talk about the cause and effect of these issues the fact that they show up out of nowhere in some people's mind is because they engage in willful ignorance jim they don't want to know what's going on there and if they had any idea then it would be something that would play differently like for example i know how angry republicans were at obama and yet his his fast and furious program where they were giving cartels surplus pentagon equipment with tracers that they would trace it back to them and the people just ripped off the traces and took the weapons and started a giant war who buys high grade artillery and weapons like that in northern mexico who would jim off in cartel right now it's over where the the spike of violence that comes in th area and children coming to the border what do they get at the border the same people from an another party spitting at them screaming at a bus full of children who think that they're tough no you people are tough you're pathetic and who's the victim you're a bunch of kids who are destabilized by the guy from the other party that you don't like this is why the democratic party is the party of bad ideas and the republican party is the party of no ideas so you're either looking for a third party  disenchanted with the writer they felt like those things that happened world not a fake liberalism in the sense that even you know our colleague dr cornel west was extremely critical in ways that i feel like the news media should have been and that's the problem we looked at that as if it was an end all dick to read and we didn't do the research that when you look at it obama is not the first prominent black man to hold a position of power in a white controlled empire there were african emperors of rome but the only difference is that the romans and greeks their ancestors didn't have the same cancer of racism that their descendants do today they respected talent so when you see a lucy a septum a severus or you see someone like that it's a listen this was a tyrant a caesar a conqueror a warrior and you look at the legacy of the years that came before trump and you see the knocking over of libya the destabilization of syria you know  third party nick braun and who's been on the show a cornell as well tied with the times for building a people's party chris hedges people like that sounds like you'd be aligned with that as well i mean i have various  friends of mine that are either let's say green libertarian on the fence something i would say i have wonderful conversations with them but there's always something missing from that particular question for me but i would do well on that but i welcome those conversations right because i think that when you talk about human rights it has to be across the board you can't have this kind of salad bar human rights issues that we've had especially in case of yemen palestine syria it's been a huge it's been a salad bar jim people have said oh no  i'll choose this as a human rights issue but i'll ignore that so i want to make a big deal out of communist cuba but this right wing death squads kleptocracy that exist in el salvador right i'll let them keep running so we're looking for a universal moral  transformation in the sense that the apocrypha see i think i think the intent but i think that's one big problem jim if we're talking about universe universe well we're talking about the universe there's no more ality in space just like there's no  thing if we went to another country and i know we're about to end but if we would have another woman who went to another planet jim and we encountered a new species of aliens and they had killed or dominated all the other species on their planet genocide and other versions of themselves to be the controlling epic of the world would we think they're the most barbarian thing that they consume the flesh of all the other creatures would they be monsters or would be be looking in a mirror well and i guess i love talking about that type of stuff in hip hop you know  in radical love and the transformation of the human soul speaking tuesday to power and and devising ways to communicate that this is your people have done and all peoples in various ways for thousands of years your passion here as and i mean i've i've hinted at this before but i'm in the process of writing a book and a lot of people have contacted me about what the book is going to be but i'm in the process of writing it now and i just reconstructed my time that i haven't done a song with in years dude ill bill are the rugged man i mean i'm definitely that those features are going to come out but then of course the middle passage which is the record i've been working on right for years and years is finally