Davey D: Oakland's Hip-Hop Activism
[Davey D is a journalist and community activist from the Bay Area. He hosts the daily syndicated radio show Hard Knock Radio.]
One of the hallmarks of Oakland, Calif, is its activism and politics and its longtime alignment with hip-hop culture. When I say "aligned," I'm not talking about a rapper doing a song where he spits a couple of cool verses with a socially relevant message. Don't get me wrong; that's important, too, but that's just surface stuff. Political involvement requires much more. As a radio journalist, writer and activist who's been living in Oakland for the past 22 years, I feel privileged to live in a city where hip-hop and political activism are so closely linked....
The notion of the artist as activist is rooted in a long tradition that goes back to the heyday of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement and other organizing efforts around the Black Power movements and liberation struggles that were popular here in Oakland during the 1960s and '70s. Back then, activists figured out that one of the most effective ways to engage a community was through cultural expression.
The Panthers did this effectively with the artwork of Emory Douglas, who was their minister of culture. They also did this via their revolutionary band, the Lumpen. Acts like Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and Gil Scott-Heron had an influence on early hip-hop in Oakland. But so did the more politicized works of popular acts like James Brown, Sly Stone, Parliament and Fela Kuti.
Early on, key elders from past liberation movements, such as former Black Panther Kiilu Nyasha, aka Sister Kiilu, sat down with Oakland's hip-hop community to educate them about activism. Sister Kiilu said that in the late '80s, when she was organizing events in support of then-political prisoner and former Panther Geronimo Pratt, her daughter was heavily into the emerging gangsta rap scene....
Read entire article at The Root
One of the hallmarks of Oakland, Calif, is its activism and politics and its longtime alignment with hip-hop culture. When I say "aligned," I'm not talking about a rapper doing a song where he spits a couple of cool verses with a socially relevant message. Don't get me wrong; that's important, too, but that's just surface stuff. Political involvement requires much more. As a radio journalist, writer and activist who's been living in Oakland for the past 22 years, I feel privileged to live in a city where hip-hop and political activism are so closely linked....
The notion of the artist as activist is rooted in a long tradition that goes back to the heyday of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement and other organizing efforts around the Black Power movements and liberation struggles that were popular here in Oakland during the 1960s and '70s. Back then, activists figured out that one of the most effective ways to engage a community was through cultural expression.
The Panthers did this effectively with the artwork of Emory Douglas, who was their minister of culture. They also did this via their revolutionary band, the Lumpen. Acts like Last Poets, the Watts Prophets and Gil Scott-Heron had an influence on early hip-hop in Oakland. But so did the more politicized works of popular acts like James Brown, Sly Stone, Parliament and Fela Kuti.
Early on, key elders from past liberation movements, such as former Black Panther Kiilu Nyasha, aka Sister Kiilu, sat down with Oakland's hip-hop community to educate them about activism. Sister Kiilu said that in the late '80s, when she was organizing events in support of then-political prisoner and former Panther Geronimo Pratt, her daughter was heavily into the emerging gangsta rap scene....