Let’s Get Free: Living Hip-Hop History Fifteen Years Later

dead prez interviewed by Gabriel San Roman ~ Rap duo dead prez exploded on the hip-hop scene 15 years ago like a Molotov cocktail. Their debut album Let’s Get Free, released March 14, 2000 on Loud Records, excoriated injustice with unabashed revolutionary bravado.  Together M-1 and Stic.man revived the prophetic and political potential of hip-hop… Read more…

Black Future Month Is Here

Ytasha L. Womack ~ Afrofuturism captures the imagination because it empowers people to rethink their lives, their world, and the future from a safe space of creativity and resilience.  For many people who look to disturbing images in media and their troubled neighborhoods as definitions of who they are, Afrofuturism is a reminder that they can imagine something new, something fresh, something that reflects the world they’d like to live in… Read more…

The Messiah and the Muse

Alexander Billet ~ By the time this review is published, the world will have had a good two months to settle in with D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Plenty of reviews have already been written, the album analyzed and listened to from countless angles. Its lyrics have been dissected and quoted plenty (“All we wanted was a chance to talk, ’stead we only got outlined in chalk”)... Read more…

Family Tree

Richard Wallace a.k.a. EPIC ~ For Black History Month, Chicago hip-hop artist Epic decided to release a video from his recently released album #OPRAH every week. This track, as readers can no doubt see, front-loads a great deal that makes a radical understanding of this month so important. Black resistance — social, political and cultural — runs deep, and that can't be forgotten... Read more...

More Than Just Demands

Joseph G. Ramsey ~ To sing as part of a crowd is not just to raise one’s voice, but to infuse that voice with emotion, to blend it with others and take strength from that blending. A movement that sings together is a movement that is at least starting to believe in itself, a movement that is no longer embarrassed to put itself out there… Read more…

Issue One: "Art + Revolution"

From the editorial: The cultural moment does not simply call for “art and revolution” but “art plus revolution.” The difference may seem pedantic. But it is an important one. Counterposing contemporary art, literature, film, music and poetry with an abstraction of what revolutionary art “should be” is too limiting. Far more productive, interesting and useful is the struggle to apply a radical worldview to art and creativity as they actually exist in the here and now. From that point we can start to grapple with what it means to “revolutionize everyday life” in the present.

Also featured: The Iconography of the French Revolution ~ Theatre For the People: A Roundtable With Oracle Productions ~ A WAR (Arab Women, Art & Revolution) ~ Bad Girlz Bring the Noize: How Mujeres of Color Are Radicalizing Popular Music ~ Constructivism: Notes On Art + Revolution ~ Music and Historical Memory ~ No Guarantees ~ The Rebel's Guide to Art History ~ The Messiah and the Muse  ~ The Rise, Fall and Disapparation of Rupert Atwell ~ Marionette Divorce ~ Steal Away: The Visions of Nat Turner