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Freddie
Foxxx a.k.a. "Bumpy Knuckles"
Spits Truth At Hip Hop 101
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
Attorney, activist and WHAT radio talk show
host Michael Coard is passionate about life, justice and black
liberation. He is an activist in the truest sense in that he is
not one to sit back with a "Let George Do It" attitude
and spectate on the sidelines of life. Coard noticed that when
he went to venues featuring Hip Hop artists very often the only
other Africans in the spot were the artists themselves.
Not wanting Hip Hop to go the way of Blues,
Jazz and R&B, co-opted by corporate America, ripped off by
white imitators and wannabes Coard elected to do something about
it. He started teaching a course called Hip Hop 101 at Temple
University's Pan African Studies Community Education Program
better known as PASCEP. The Thursday night course is quite
popular for a variety of reasons, Coard unabashedly promotes Hip
Hop as an extension of African culture, he encourages students
to participate, stand up and share their poetry rhymes and
beats, he stresses critical thinking, language comprehension and
lyrical skills, and understanding all of the elements of Hip Hop--the
M.C., the DJ and mixing, break dancing. and graffiti.
In addition he brings in professional
artists like Chuck D of Public Enemy, The Last Emperor, DJs like
Lady B and Mamma Wit The Drama. Last Thursday's guest was New
York MC Freddie Foxxx, who has been in the "game"
since the late '80's having worked with the likes of KRS-One and
Naughty By Nature as well as launching his own solo career.
Freddie Foxxx came on set to speak to the class and promote his
latest CD KONEXion. As usual and especially when a special guest
is in the house, the class was full. Freddie came from an
historical perspective about black creativity juxtaposed with
white control and exploitation.
Before he hit full stride Foxxx had to put
an obnoxious "know it all" Caucasian in his place, to
the delight of most of the class. Foxxx touched on a wide range
of topics and gave an insider's view of the industry. Speaking
on why the majority of fans at Hip Hop concerts are Caucasian
Foxxx stated, "The reason why you see a majority of shows
where there are more white kids than black kids in the audience
is because black people have a 'court jester mentality'. Black
people in America and world wide have been trained to entertain.
The reason they have been trained to entertain is because as
slaves, their ability to perform for the master has caused them
to want to be the dancer, the singer, the guitar player, the
violin player while the white man seduced them with respectable
business. Respectable business is simply the art of calming you
down while they stick you up."
Elaborating on this theme Foxxx shared how
corporate America traditionally exploits and misuses black
artists. Foxxx told
the audience he planned to chip away at their misconceptions and
even their self esteem about being MCs or rappers but he was
doing it with the goal of replacing it ten fold. "Don't get
mad at me, hopefully I can walk out of here and not have to kick
nobody's ass. I want to get at you so you can really understand
what's going down."
During his hour and a half lecture Foxxx
touched on a myriad of issues. One of the main things he told
the class was, "If you expect someone to invest in you (as
an artist), the first thing I look at is to see how much you've
invested in yourself. The first form of self-investment is when
you get up in the morning, how do you take care of yourself
before you walk out that door. How do you present yourself to
the public? How do you approach people?"
Then he launched into a history lesson
about color and music, "Back then when Lloyd Price and Fats
Domino created for Rock and Roll what is now the heartbeat,
which is the back beat in the music; the drum from Africa is the
heartbeat to all black music. In 1952 the back beat was created
by two black men Lloyd Price and Fats Domino.
"Elvis Presley recorded (did his
version of Lloyd Price's) 'Lawdy Miss Claudy' twice, Chuck Berry
didn't invent Rock and Roll he enhanced it. The white man came
in and stole it; Middle America, there's no beat to their music.
Black music in America was the homicide for Lawrence Welk and
the other no-beat white music. When you know the creation of
black music and where it comes from you realize black music is
the biggest export in America, black music is totally exploited
by white America. They control popular media, they control the
way it gets exposed.
"Black people create mainstream, white
people control mainstream. So now when you take your ability to
spit (rhyme and rap) it took a while for them to catch up to
yall, they tried with the Beastie Boys they tried again with
Vanilla Ice. They tried to make the white MC bigger than Hip
Hop, how can you do that, how can you make one person bigger
than the entity itself?
"Hip Hop music was created as an
escape for the woes of the ghetto that's why it was created. It
wasn't created to say , who is the nicest, who has the most
jewelry, that only came about when it was discovered Hip Hop was
worth something. We have been robbed again of our creative
juices, abilities and you know who I want to thank for allowing
this stick up to go down, you. (pointing at the audience) I
don't mean just you in this room I mean everybody that looks
like you because people have forgotten about developing
themselves as artists."
Foxxx explained the attraction of Hip Hop
to white kids, that it was an outgrowth of their rebellion and
alienation from their families too obsessed with success to pay
them any attention, that white rebellion linked with a black
creativity spawned by black's rebellion and rage against
negative conditions could in fact be good.
"The rebellion of the white kids and
the rebellion of the black kids even though they are for
different reasons come to the same level. They actually need
each other. When a white kid is in the midst of black kids,
corporate America will kill their own to kill us. 'What does
that have to do with Hip Hop Foxxx, I just want to spit',"
Foxxx asked mockingly.
"White kids have a key to the door,
the door, the financial door that you need to get your skills to
mass media that their people control. What's the problem of them
pulling the load for a little while? If he's willing to play his
role and I'm willing to play my role we can both get money. Hip
Hop is about rebellion, the sad part about it, is we don't have
any control over it."
Foxxx stayed well past the time allotted
for the class and most of those in attendance stayed until the
end, hanging on his words during the question and answer
session. Coard's vision of the Hip Hop 101 class continues
holding forth, providing insight into the culture as well as
stimulating thought. 13
April 2003
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
* * * * *
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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update 19
December 2011
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