Dead Prez

Lizzoutline by

19/09/20

M-1 and Stic are two fellows who met on campus at university in Florida, hung out, and then took on the world, one fly rhyme at a time. Revolutionaries at their core, they advocate healthy eating, being proactive in politics and community, and huge tunes. You may know them from one of the phattest hip hop tracks ever, It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop, which is in any self-respecting music fan’s collection. It’s revolutionary hip hop with a gangsta lean. I spoke to M-1 as he sunned himself in Miami.

You guys met at FAMU (Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University) originally. What were you intending to do for careers following your training?

I attended the university and Stic was a local person who was using the resources on campus but didn’t officially attend the university! He was just using them for his own benefit. That shows you how resourceful Stic has been since I’ve known him! I was there though, having arrived from NYC with no idea what school was like. There were not many choices offered to me as a young, black person in America besides drug dealing or joining the US military, which a lot of my friends did. One of my counsellors offered me the opportunity to go to school, so when I arrived on campus at FAMU, I had no idea of what to do; I just followed my room mate around, who was doing business. I signed up for some business courses and learnt a lot about business, but more than anything I learnt that I didn’t want to do that. I was only there for a year before I realised my real education was going to come from a revolutionary political education tied to what was going on in our ‘hood, in our streets and across the country. So I started out finding out how corporate and capitalist business worked, did it for one semester and that was enough!

Did you go into music primarily as a platform to put your views across?

Music was in my blood from my mother, who taught me about music through the records she played from her collection, such as The Isley Brothers, Funkadelic and Patti LaBelle; she was also a jazz singer. As she sang in nightclubs, I found a rhythm and a vibration in music that I couldn’t deny. When I was about 16, and understood more about the political terrain of America and the world, music was definitely the vehicle that I chose to get that across. I wanted to be a revolutionary. I wanted to change political policies, affect government… basically make a revolution. I was not able to effectively do that through the tools that people usually use; leafleting, rallying and political discourse. So music became the perfect cover for people to get into what we were saying in a more interesting way. The message came clearer over the beats. It was angry. It was hip hop. It was jazz.

Your second album was called Revolutionary but Gangsta. What does that title mean to you?

We were attempting to connect with a community who had not quite got the message we were trying to get across on our first album Let’s Get Free. Yes, we were community members talking about revolutionary issues, but were also musicians trying to make really good quality music. With Let’s Be Free, we ended up going on the Warp tour, and playing Lollapalooza, and our community wasn’t there. When we decided to make our next album, we wanted to make one with a title that showed we had stuck to our community in the way we wanted to speak to them. We knew what a ‘revolutionary’ was, but weren’t sure what the world associated with the word; we meant it to mean having power in our own hands, getting our rights and justice. However, we also knew we had to do it in a gangsta way. Now, ‘gangsta’ at that time was a word that was it’s own phenomenon like ‘swag’ today. It meant you put your all onto something, and stop at nothing. We wanted to say, yes, it’s revolutionary, but don’t think it’s some kind of text book type thing. We’re having a revolution right in Brooklyn, right in Brixton. On top of that the initials RBG, from the album title, were the same as our flag of liberation, red, black and green.

Who do you find inspirational, musically and philosophically?

Some of the most influencial people in my life combined their ideological views with their music. For example, Nina Simone, a singer from the southern part of the United Star who became an international hero and spoke for women everywhere about certain issues. Fela Kuti, who was a social scientist, who through his music came to be regarded as the first black president in Africa, even though it was at the time when Kwame Nkrumah was president of Ghana. Bob Marley, obviously, and his legacy. These are kind of textbook heroes, but for me these people did it right.

I wanted to ask you about how it feels for you when you play somewhere like Norwich, where you might you play to an audience that is 99% white; yet they all really love your music and the place is packed out. How does that fit with your musical and political goals?

You know, what’s interesting is through our music we were intending the change the world, but through this process the world has changed us. We were intending to speak to a black or brown audience about liberation on those terms, but let me tell you, everybody has to be part of the revolutionary process, not just black people. That doesn’t mean being a radical, but being an active participant. And so when I see our music being reflected by white audiences around the world that just lets me know that white audiences have a job to do, to become astute in revolutionary politics, to go to those communities and talk real talk to their families, and right the wrongs. It’s not just that we have a problem in Brooklyn, or Miami; we have a problem around the world, so if we are serious about our message or what we want to do to change the world, everyone must be involved. Ending up in front of a white audience is no problem for me; we are human to begin with, and we all know what’s right and wrong. I’m here for whoever shows up for the fight. It’s not just in Europe that Dead Prez ends up in front of all white audiences; that happens in cities across America as well.

Are there plans for a new Dead Prez album soon?

There’s definitely a new Dead Prez album in our future, but Stic and I are not working on that album right now. He’s working on his solo album, the follow up to The Workout, and I’m working on mine at this minute. It’s called Contradiction and comes out early next year. I’ve been working with a lot of great people like Nas, Aloe Blacc, Scarface and the like. There’s also Dead Prez’s latest release, which is The Time Travel Remixes; I did a number of remixes for our last album, Information Age. It features Black Thought, Busta Rhymes, Reek Da Villain, D1 from New Orleans, and also Johan Hugo, from the UK. It’s available on iTunes right now.

We can’t wait for you to come play here. What can we expect?

What they should expect is a hard hitting, real hip hop show with veteran MC’s. I feel that the standard of performing has lowered throughout the years but we are continuing to raise the bar. We’ll be doing some freestyling and bringing power to the people through our music. We have learnt from people like Public Enemy and Rage Against The Machine about how to put a show together. We’ve handed out dollar bills to our audience, and fruit, as we want people to be healthy; you can expect almost anything from us. Be ready to throw your fist in the air!

Dead Prez play Norwich Arts Centre on 3rd November. Tickets from ueaticketbookings.co.uk