When I met Tech, as his road manager referred to him, he was writing notes for his show, which was about to begin at the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville, Virginia— a part of the Martyr Tour he’s doing in support of a recent mixtape release. He had a set list scrawled on three paper plates, written in blocky magic marker letters. He wore a desert digital camouflage jacket with woodland camouflage pants, black leather Nikes and an Oakland Raiders cap with marijuana leaves depicted on the underside of the brim. He stood up to shake my hand, clutching a Blackberry in the other, and met my eyes fully before he sat down, eyes shifting again between plates and his phone. I sat down on the couch perpendicular to his, and listened to the dulled sounds coming from the openers upstairs. He still seemed extremely focused on the phone, and I sat next to him dumbly for fifteen seconds before he looked up with a glare and asked if I was ready.

Over the next fifteen minutes or so, whenever Tech made a serious point, he would look up with a stare that was not so much intense as it was earnest. The Peruvian-born, Harlem raised rapper has ideas which would lead most to label him as a “radical” or a “conspiracy theorist.” In his music, he delivers his ideas with a sickly sweet flow on top of theatric production. In conversation, he speaks slowly at first, working through concepts with clear-headed passion, until he reaches conclusions and his speech quickens, perhaps betraying the personal, emotional impact the issues have on him. In either mode, his ideas roll into your head and live there. He has an addictive, socially unacceptable and relentlessly empathetic brand of politics, but Tech comes across as so sincere that you can’t help but wonder about the truth behind his viewpoints.

As such, I felt compelled to fact check the interview below, and the endnotes that follow this interview attempt to verify or illuminate some of his statements. I am not trying to prop up his ideas, but after researching what he said, I believe Tech’s ideas should not be dismissed out of hand. The issues raised in this interview should at least be explored and contemplated, and the endnotes aim to aid such reflection.

GADFLY: So it’s been about a week since The Martyr dropped. What has the reaction been like so far?

TECH: Overwhelming. It has been less than five days and we have had, I don’t even know the numbers because when we checked 3 days ago, it was close to 300,000 by the end of the day, by now maybe 400,000. We are going to have a new influx of people that are promoting it and putting it out to as many individuals as possible. Incredibly important, to me, was the fact that we were capable of reaching just so many people. We never had anticipated this. MediaFire[i] thought that we were pirating movies or something. They called us up like, “What the hell is going on? What did you put up there?” I said “Oh, sorry, it’s just an album.” So I mean just an incredible response.[ii]

GADFLY: How did you intend to market it? Was it supposed to be a mixtape, or is it an album that you are putting out for free? I’ve heard people call it both. Or does that difference matter?

TECH: The Martyr is a collection of previously unreleased and new tracks that reflect what’s going on in this society, and every other society that’s been on the brink of economic ruin and mass corruption. The decision to put it out came about when I just had a stockpile of material I was not going to use for The Middle Passage [Immortal Technique’s next album]— so I wanted to give thirsty fans something. I had to let them know that real hip-hop isn’t dead. That’s a very cliché term, but by “real hip-hop” I mean non-corporate controlled hip-hop, stuff that doesn’t try and sell you a watch. I am not trying to market myself; I just put me on a record.

GADFLY: Speaking of current events, I know you were up at Occupy Wall Street back in September, what were your impressions of the movement when you were there?

TECH: It was blossoming when I first got there; I saw it develop a lot. I saw that there were a lot of individuals that were there because they were genuinely concerned. I saw people that were there just to be there because there is nowhere else to be because of money. I think the large majority of people that are there are really, really intelligent, fed-up people. People who have seen corruption and the complete destruction of America’s economy come by the hands of people that have removed themselves from any accountability for what they have done. It would be interesting to see them focus on creating polling blocks, focus on doing things that affect local elections, that affect local politics and then be able to push that into a larger frame of affecting national politics. I think they need to fight the fringe groups that are trying to take control of them, and you have an incredibly difficult job of fighting with the Democratic Party, which is obviously going to want to take control of them. Rather than fighting people, I think it would be better for them to find commonalities with certain groups within Republican and conservative realms. There are people within both parties that are genuinely dissatisfied. Pull them out of that sphere of thinking that they just have to toe the party line no matter what. At some point you are going to have to think for yourself instead of always being led by someone within your party.

GADFLY: You’ve been calling for a revolution, in your music, for years. Do you think Occupy Wall Street is a part of that?

TECH: I think it’s a piece of it. But when you talk about revolution you have to understand that the reason I use it in my music with a lot more focus now is because I don’t want to give people the idea that I’m sitting here romanticizing about dead bodies in the street, people getting shot. Periods of complete anarchy are just about the last thing we want, but at the same time I know that if society isn’t willing to conform and help the needs of the people that it claims to represent, that it uses as batteries to power its machine, then it really only has two options: Literal repression, fascism— a complete autocratic regime controlled by an oligarchy and regional governments that hold everything down and keep people in line because they are terrified of the consequences; or a simple acceptance of certain amount of responsibility for what’s happened, what’s wrong with the country.

There was a sign that was really interesting at Occupy Wall Street. It said, “I’ll accept that human beings are a corporation when this government puts one of them in jail.” Nobody that did anything wrong, that was predatory, put out predatory loans, actually had anything happen to them that’s negative.[iii] Yet someone can steal a soda from a store and then go to jail for 2 years.[iv] It doesn’t even make any sense to tell you. Oh, you know what, I am a human rights violator, dictator of some country and I ordered a massacre. Yet here comes a person who signs to continue to bomb another country based on intelligence that is not true. There is no connection to Al Qaeda – they have no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons, no chemical weapons – oops – sorry – now it’s a democratization effort.

What would happen in America if someone made that mistake with us? I’m talking about innocent civilians, random individuals who have not a fucking thing to do with the violence; they just want to live in peace. Random men and women in Charlottesville, random men and women in Richmond, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, all over the place, bombed the fuck out, killed, murdered, slaughtered. Chalked up to collateral damage. Where is the accountability for that? We haven’t even given so much as an “I’m sorry, whoops.” It’s been “Fuck you, we are here to stay now. We might move our combat troops out but our embassy is always going to be here and we are always going to be intricately linked to your government no matter what it is. Until the insurgents tear this shit down.”

GADFLY: Is that what motivated your organization in Afghanistan?[v] Maybe a feeling of shared guilt because your country—

TECH: You know what it is? It is a study of history. When you see the Taliban and you study what they are, they are a group of orphans. They were orphaned by the war against the Soviets. Many of them received some education, but instead of receiving a secular education, it was one totally rooted in scripture. Imagine what their lives would have been like with a little bit of love and a little bit of care. Someone who really knows love in their life can’t take somebody into a stadium and stone them to death for some trivial crime. At some point when you look at the history in Afghanistan, you have to realize that they are such a young country. Most of their adult population was wiped out in a brutal revolution against an unjust system, which at the time just happened to be a Soviet system that was threatening the culture of a people that were living there for thousands and thousands of years.[vi] We didn’t have a problem with the most conservative, fundamentalist elements back then, but we have a problem with them now. We didn’t call it terrorism.[vii]

What is terrorism then? Is it an action, or is it an action against certain people?[viii] If that’s the case then it doesn’t really hold a very strong philosophical argument. [ix] So it’s murder when I kill you, but it is not murder when you kill me, why? Because I’m a different color, because I’m a different race? No? Then what is it? Because right now we are not calling what they did against the Russians terrorism. IEDs blowing up stuff, bombs. You know, I know the people see the difference and they say “Oh no, terrorism is about attacking civilians. That is the big difference. We [Americans] are not attacking civilians.” At that point I kind of lose respect for them.

You can use anything to try to convert it into a rationale saying, “That was a viable military target.” So many [extremist] militants came out saying “Oh yes, on 9/11, we didn’t just attack a civilian target, there weren’t just civilians involved. There was a command center. There were labs. We were attacking the financial center.”[x] If we [as Americans] are willing to deny them that claim and say, “No, you just killed civilians. That’s a really cheap excuse that you used to attack our people.” Then what’s our excuse for blowing up a hospital, blowing up a school? Whoops, we killed a wedding party.[xi] Sorry, we got the wrong people. We don’t care who died, because it doesn’t really fucking matter; we’re not going to be held accountable for it anyways. I am not a religious person but I believe in God and I think those people are going to be held accountable for what they did, within the compass of their own self.

GADFLY: In “Ultimas Palabras,” on The Martyr, you talk about those people. Who are they exactly?

TECH: The people who control the corporations, the people who control the companies are so high up and so well in place that they take on these non-assuming roles. I think Americans don’t even realize how close we are to having some sort of economic aristocracy.

The point when we are discussing the way music reflects real life, the way that painstakingly, over the years, what I have said is really a metaphor for what’s happening to America. It used to be about, or tried to be at the very beginning, about what was right. It has stopped being what was right for America; it started being about what was right for companies that are in control. That was what this speech [in “Ultimas Palabras”] kind of spoke about.

At some point, where do we confront that within ourselves? We have to be responsible for that. We are responsible for all these things that are happening. And then it really begins to sink in how powerful we are: Because if we’re responsible for it, then we have the power to change it. Not just see it.

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[i] A website which hosts files, including The Martyr.