| |
Taken from emplive - Video of the Week (February, 2003)
 What: Hip-hop artists
Interviewed: March 19, 1998; December 1, 1999; October 1, 1999
Where: Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York
Watch Video ? HI | LO
The Players: Ice-T is one of hip-hop's most articulate rappers, known for his often incisive - and controversial - lyrics. Since 1990, he's established himself as an actor, working in films and TV, including a regular role as a cop on NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Michael Franti is an activist, poet, and leader of Spearhead, which blends hip-hop, funk, and classic soul with socially conscious lyrics; Grandmaster Caz is a multitalented performer who started out as a b-boy in the early 1970s and soon added DJ-ing and MC-ing to the mix. He's best known as the lead MC of the Cold Crush Brothers.
Read an excerpt from the interview:
Ice-T: Now one thing rap was able to do was let the black kids from Los Angeles hear what the kids in New York were doin'. It let the kids in Houston speak on their neighborhood, and let everybody get together and have like a big phone line that goes on, and let the brothers speak out and say, "This how we feel about the bitches." The girls was able to say, "Well, you all ain't all that," and the girl rappers came back. And we all had our little dialogue right out here in the open, or in the record racks of Tower Records or whoever played it. Everybody who speaks in this conversation isn't necessarily intelligent. Everybody isn't wise. But they're allowed to speak.
Michael Franti: Well, the main thing about hip-hop is that it's a music that...it's kind of like soccer in a way, which is a strange metaphor, but I've seen people in other parts of the world play soccer with a wad of rags, just on the street, barefoot with no net and a goal or whatever. And then I've seen people, say, play soccer on a field, beautifully cut green grass, goals all lined up, uniforms, referees, time clocks. And hip-hop is the same way. It can be done in coliseums, or it can just be done with people, without any instrument, just rhyming on the street corner. And I think that's what the power of it is, and that's why it has affected so many communities, especially people of color throughout the world. When they see an outlet for people who have traditionally had no voice being able to say things in a way that people want to listen to them, that's the magic of rhyming.
Grandmaster Caz: Well, I mean, I always had a talent for writing, you know what I mean, poetry and stuff like that, but it was never, you know, it was something that I just was good at, you know. It was a gift. It's not anything that I thought would come in, you know, to play later on. But when hip-hop, you know, came along, I mean, that just opened up a whole new world o' expression for everything. Every talent I had I could apply it to hip-hop and, you know what I mean, and that's why I'm still doin' it.
Ice-T: I think the best thing hip-hop did as a whole was give another avenue of music. I mean to me it's like the birth of rock 'n'roll in our neighborhoods, and it gave us something that we could do with little or nothing. A drum machine ... people hated . "Oh you just have a drum machine, you have a turntable." You know what? We ain't got nothin'. We don't have nothin', but we gonna still make us some music usin' somethin' you made, okay? But we're gonna make something, and you're gonna turn around and like it 'cause we can do this. So it's something that was built right from nothin' but the dialogue, and the vibe, and what we put out there in the music, you know, 'cause I've been through the sampling wars and all that, but it's creativity still, you know.
Michael Franti: Rhyming is like an equation. You have like, you know, "cat" on one side equals "hat" on the other side. And the more elaborate the equation is on one side, if you can get it to equal something on the other side, there's a lot of pleasure that's derived from that, and I think that that pleasure comes from us as humans; we crave symmetry, you know? We have two eyes, we have two hands, we have five fingers on each hand, two ears, you know. Everything that we are attracted to is symmetry and when people are able to create that symmetry through beats and through rhymes and have that symmetry mean something, and say it in a funny way and an eloquent way, in a way that has never been done through the traditional use of the language, is beautiful, and people respond to it and are attracted to it.
Ice-T: What hip-hop did in the last few years is what really gave it its longevity because the rappers like myself said, "Now that we got you all lookin', we're gonna branch out. And now that we've branched out we're in television. We're in movies, we're ..." and the whole vibe is somebody's yellin', "Look at jazz, look at R&B, look at the things that we black people have made in America and we don't own it. We got to own it now." And for the first time you got more rap kids owning labels, being producers, runnin' their own clothing lines, puttin' out their own movies. Like Master P just put his own movie out, you know, it never came out in the theaters so he put it out. But this is what it's all about because it's a lot of money that's bein' made and this money goes back into the neighborhoods.
|
|
