Right: Photo by Yessenia Camacho. Left: Immortal Technique’s “The Middle Passage” mixtape cover.
Days after Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza ramped up in December 2023, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Lower Manhattan, chanting pro-Palestine protest slogans.
“It’s important for us to acknowledge that Israel takes orders from the United States, that it’s resupplied by the United States,” one protester named Felipe Andres Coronel called out to the gathering crowds. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the United States pulls the strings.”
Better known by his stage name, Immortal Technique, Coronel is one of the most iconic hip-hop artists of the 2000s. Often mentioned in the same breath as collaborators Lowkey, KRS-one and Public Enemy, the legendary underground rapper is known for his razor-sharp critiques of the Bush administration’s war on terror and the U.S.’s violent interventions in the Middle East and Latin America.
When Immortal Technique burst on the scene more than two decades ago, the Peruvian American rapper quickly gained a reputation as one of hip-hop’s most fiercely outspoken and militant artists, hailed for his raw lyrics and ability to weave history, social commentary and complex political themes effortlessly into his music. And in the decade and a half since his last album, Immortal Technique’s activism and critique of U.S. imperialism have only sharpened.
“It’s not that this is something new,” the independent rapper tells Analyst News of the genocide in Gaza. “This is just them [the U.S. government] mowing the lawn in another part of the Middle East. They did that in Iraq and a million people died — out of those million people, how many of them were children? In Afghanistan, 275,000 people — how many of them were children?”
Palestinian officials have documented the killings of at least 44,179 people, though Brown University researchers estimate that the death toll from Israel’s genocide of Gaza likely exceeds 100,000. A recent U.N. analysis suggests that close to 70% of those killed are women and children.
“It’s horrific, but par for the course with the United States,” Coronel says.
From Bush to Obama to Biden to Trump, Immortal Technique says the U.S. government’s deep-seated bipartisan willingness to sponsor violence against innocent civilians to further their own agenda has been a constant.
“Whether it’s been a Republican or a Democratic president, that’s one thing that’s been resoundingly the same … when it comes to certain things like Israel, they’re both committed to backing a genocide blindly.”
A revolutionary is born
Born in 1978 in a military hospital in Lima, Coronel lived in Peru until the age of three, when his father decided it was too dangerous for his family to remain there. The land was engulfed by economic instability and a bloody civil war, waged between the Maoist fighters of the Shining Path Resistance and the CIA-backed Peruvian government, which sought to prevent communism from taking root in Latin America.
Coronel’s family soon immigrated to the U.S., settling in Harlem, New York, where they soon realized they had traded one war zone for another.
The Harlem of Coronel’s childhood was a dangerous place filled with gangs, drugs and police corruption. In the ‘80s, New York City had been decimated by poverty and the neglected AIDS epidemic — which disproportionately affected Black and Latino communities — and was on the cusp of the crack-cocaine epidemic that would grip most major American cities well into the ’90s. By the time Coronel was a teen, he had been arrested multiple times for what he describes as “selfish and childish behavior.” A year into university, Coronel was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison over multiple assault-related charges.
There, Coronel started taking his rhyming skills seriously, using a pen and notepad supplied by a prison guard after being placed in solitary. Upon being paroled in 1999, Coronel returned to Harlem and began competing in various battle rap competitions under the stage name Immortal Technique, even competing on the first season of BET’s 106 & Park Freestyle Fridays.
Immortal Technique quickly gained a reputation as a ferocious battle emcee, racking up awards on the circuit. In September 2001, he used the earnings from his rap battle victories to release his debut album, Revolutionary Vol. 1, which he sold at his shows and on the street. The album received critical acclaim, particularly for the now-iconic track “Dance With the Devil.” With its dark, bone-chilling lyrics, telling the tragic story of a young man’s descent into violent crime, the track spread rapidly across the burgeoning internet scene of the early 2000s and launched his career. Behind the graphic rhymes, he named his mission loud and clear: “To socialistically unite the Third World countries / expose hypocrisy in America’s democracy / … trample and dismantle your capitalist philosophy.”
In 2003, Immortal Technique released a follow-up album, Revolutionary Vol. 2, which offered a blistering critique of the U.S. government and the then-incumbent George W. Bush Administration. The album covered issues of racism, poverty, drug trade, censorship, the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent “war on terror,” mass surveillance, the Iraq War and class struggle.
“They bombed innocent people, tryna murder Saddam / When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran,” he rapped on The 4th Branch, a track excoriating the corporate media for its role in manufacturing consent for war. “Embedded correspondents don’t tell the source of the tension / And they refuse to even mention European intervention / Or the massacres in Jenin, the innocent screams / U.S.-manufactured missiles and M16s / Weapon contracts and corrupted American dreams / Media censorship blocking out the video screens.”
The album earned him a feature in The Source Magazine’s “Unsigned Hype” column, describing the independent emcee as “poised to take his brand of political-science-over-beats beyond the battles and into corporate offices.” Pitchfork hailed the album as “a testament to the power of the independent voice in music,” saying his radical message “breaks through the issues to prove him one of the most promising new emcees in underground hip-hop.”
And Coronel put his money where his mouth was. All proceeds from his follow-up album, 2008’s The 3rd World, went toward constructing an orphanage in Kabul, Afghanistan, through Omeid International, a nonprofit rebuilding the lives of war orphans. During the pandemic, he launched The Rebel Army Runs, a charitable project which continued to distribute free food, water, diapers and other basic needs to impoverished seniors, children and other vulnerable residents in Harlem. He’s also frequently performs at benefit concerts for Gaza and speaks at pro-Palestine rallies.
A new wave of anti-war activism
Two decades after America’s post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Coronel says, U.S. politics and policy have only become more extreme, with bipartisan calls for harsher border security, hawkish support of Israel, and insistence on funding and arming human rights violations overseas.
“We’re still living under the ‘9/11 effect,’ which caused all politics to shift to the right,” the rapper tells Analyst News. “What that does is enable people to use language like ‘collateral damage’ when they talk about killing 15,000 children.”
U.S. President Joe Biden has consistently voiced his unwavering support for the Israeli government, sending billions in both financial and military aid to the Israeli military. Even as he claims that he has done “more for the Palestinian community than anybody,” Biden has repeatedly said he considers himself a Zionist and an ally of Israel.
“When we look at Mr. Biden and his position on the border, or his position on the war in Gaza it has definitely been on the right of Mr. Trump,” Coronel says. “The U.S.’s role has been clear throughout the entire [Israeli] occupation.”
Immortal Technique, right, performs alongside Poison Pen at the Yost Theatre in Santa Ana, California, on Jan. 21, 2024. Photo by Yessenia Camacho
The veteran emcee has also voiced his support and concern for student protestors staging protests on campuses, especially with several top universities responding to protests with violent police crackdowns and attempts to criminalize pro-Palestinian speech.
This, too, is an age-old strategy, he says.
“Every country — be it the U.S., Mexico, or Peru, where I’m from — when the government turns to fascism, the first thing that they do is kill the kids,” Coronel says. “Because those are the future thinkers. Because those are the people who will create everything, who will make everything in a new society, and they want those people controlled.”
The pro-Palestinian protests and encampments on campuses across the U.S. have been a stark contrast to the relatively minimal pushback that both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars received in the early 2000s in the aftermath of 9/11. Coronel suggests that was made possible through social media eroding control of popular narratives from both the U.S. government and mainstream legacy news media.
“The only difference between then and today is that social media didn’t exist back then the way it does now,” Coronel says. “People were barely uploading songs on Myspace back in 2006 and 2007.”
“Just imagine what we would have seen if we had the ability to upload Snapchats, TikToks, Facebook posts and Instagrams about the carnage, the mutilated bodies, the children who were born with birth defects because of the depleted uranium that was just frivolously left everywhere all over Iraq.”
The activist emcee urges student organizers and young activists to turn to their history books as the country marches toward an uncertain future, to learn from the successes and mistakes of groups including the Weathermen, the American Indian Movement and Black Lives Matter.
“Study the history of other movements that have taken place — not just the successful ones, but the ones that met with problematic aspects, and others with failure,” he says. “Look at the way these movements were demonized.”
With a second Trump term set to begin in a few weeks, Coronel stresses that the fight against fascism, domestically and abroad, is far from over — regardless of which political party holds office.
“If we started out in this rebellion against the Empire and its support of its colony Israel and all the things it’s doing, we’ve gone past the ‘New Hope’ stage,” he says, drawing a parallel to the Star Wars trilogy.
“We’ve destroyed the Death Star — we got some of these places to divest. But the Empire’s not gone. We’re now actually in the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ part of this rebellion.”
