Dead Prez Lets Get Free |TOP| Zip
Josephine Heathershaw
M1 of dead prez The debut album by dead prez, Let's Get Free (Loud), has received an amount of press attention wildly inconsistent with the impact it's making on the national hiphop scene. As far as I can tell, everyone is feeling dead prez. This interview reveals, in part, why few are writing about them. Secondly, these two young men are ready and willing to do the dirty work the conscious hiphoppers of the 80s left behind. Those emcees galvanized the hiphop movement by connecting the music with black power, black nationalism, African-American historical revisionism and the global buying power of non-white consumers. It was a fairly joyous process for all involved. Which is probably why so many political rappers are still stuck on that moment.
But to actually go forward with a leftist hiphop cultural revolution, a few more things have to change. The soldiers have to become far more disciplined and unified than they currently are. They have to weed out the radical chic element?all those kids chanting "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" at the Rage Against the Machine concert, directing the sentiment only at their parents and a few hockey-arena security guards. Unlike Rage, dead prez isn't letting their white suburban fans think of themselves as victims of oppression. They're hardly easier on black upper-middle-class heads, who I imagine enjoyed the almost-10-year respite since someone last excoriated "Uncle Toms" on a hiphop album. Nouveau-riche rap celebrities, comparatively, get a free ride (though they do get scolded en masse in the scathing second verse of "Hip Hop"), prompting my first question for M1.
On Feb. 8, 2000, dead prez dropped their debut album, Let's Get Free. An urgent rallying call to Black folks across the Diaspora, the album was celebratory, cautionary, and demanding at once, and immediately established M1 and stic.man as dynamic voices in Hip-Hop.
Recently DJ Cipha Sounds and Peter Rosenberg hosted Stic and M1 of dead prez on their Juan Ep is Dead podcast. The conversation covered the group's rise to fame, Nipsey Hussle, Let's Get Free, and more. Stream the full episode on any digital streaming platform.
Supreme joins hip-hop duo dead prez for its latest collaborative Fall 2019 collection. Composed of rappers M-1 and stic.man, the duo first met in 1990 while attending the HBCU Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. Sharing a similar socio-political ideology developed by their involvement and work with the pan-African Uhuru Movement, the duo later moved to New York to further their community-building message, and to grow their music to act as a bigger platform for activism.
What would you expect a conversation between a cartoonist and a rapper to sound like? Get ready for a gripping exchange between two politically savvy intellectuals, famous cartoonist Khalil Bendib (Bendib.com) and Mutulu Olugbala, aka M1 (deadprez.com). The interview begins 36:20 minutes into the show.