| Issue One | Invincible 2/5 | |||
What kind of work do you do there? Do you do rap workshops?We do all kinds of workshops there, we do a poetry workshop called Poetry for a Social Change, we do media justice workshops.What is that?Media justice means the movement to build critical thinking skills around deconstructing media as well as technical skills on how to build your own media. All types of media, everything from doing independent magazines and newspapers to video. Music I consider a form of media of course, and radio. Hopefully we will have some low fm stations. The majority of the work we do on a larger scale focuses on youth leadership development, popular education, more political education workshops and a lot of consciousness raising amongst our whole community.Excellent, how do you finance that kind of work?I: That is a good question, right now at this point we are trying to become as self-sustainable as possible with the funding. Right now the funding is very much up in the air, a lot of people are getting really disillusioned with looking to certain kinds of grants. Especially in the States grants are really limited and that constrains our work. So we are looking for ways to funds ourselves, for the past three years through fund-raisers in Detroit City and even before that through fundraisers when I lived in New York. But besides fundraisers we do many things to sustain ourselves, it is very difficult. Part of the job of the youth leaders this summer will be to raise the money for there own workshops.I hear that a lot of the funding has been cut back recently in the US.Of course, with military funding increasing with all the funding that should be going to the people that is going into Lockheed and Martins pocket. I am not saying it is for the better, but ultimately it is forcing us to become more resourceful, it is forcing us to have to become sustainable. |
How did you start off mcing, writing your lyrics, how did you come to doing what you are doing today?Man, it's hard to say where I started!Five sentences.Five sentences alright I moved to the States in 88 when I didn`t speak English.Where from?From occupied Palestine, it is also called Israel, and basically I moved not knowing any English. When I learned English besides school, I learned a lot of English through just immersing myself in music. Listening to the lyrics and then copying down the lyrics of my favourite HipHop song and then spitting them back just really being surrounded by different kinds of music.Did you ever try to rap in Hebrew?No, I didn't rap when I was speaking Hebrew, when I moved to the States I totally blacked out all my Hebrew. I thought about re-learning it, but that is not the focus at the moment. Music made me learn English. My best friend and me made little raps. We would just bug out after school and run the tape recorder and rhyme. She still has those tapes somewhere, we would just act stupid and it was a big joke or whatever. But I kept doing it and then later in life it became something that kind of got me through life.What would have been the next step? Writing your own lyrics diary style or?We wrote our lyrics back then, we would take other peoples rhymes and put our own lyrics in it. And then of course, any other type of writing, any other type of music, creation as well. What really got me passionate about it and really got me into Hip Hop was when I learned how to freestyle.How did that come about?I was working in a really *bleep*ty job in a little fast food joint. One of my co-workers and me used to be in the back and when there was a line out front we would be freestylin. Also, with my friends older brother. We used to go freestyle after school. To me it was just what we were doing. It wasn't like we were good or anything, at first it was embarrasing, but when I got into it, it became something that I couldn't live without. Ever since then I've been freestyling, that was when I started writing rhymes every day and taking it seriously and having it being a craft that I wanted to hone and respect and learn the history of and really.. |
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