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The War Report Immortal Technique spits the poli-sci. For all of the criticism leveled at The Source Magazine, the publication does have an impressive list of artists who have won their monthly “Unsigned Hype” award. Past recipients include Mobb Deep, Biggie, Common, Capone ‘N’ Noreaga, Eminem and…Immortal Technique. But unlike his contemporaries, Technique opted against using the positive press as a springboard to signing a deal with a major label. And it’s not just because of money issues – most labels aren’t eager to work with a dude that spits the following about the September 11th attacks: “And just so Conservatives don't take it to heart Loosie talks to one of the few rappers that refuses to bite his tongue:
I was just talking about what I experienced living in Harlem in the street, and battling all day. But then I started doing the knowledge about a lot of things that were going on in the hood and I wanted to explain [them] to people. It wasn’t me just saying ‘this is how ill I am’, I was more trying to show people that people are getting raped in hood, people are getting killed, destroying each other. People emulate their oppressors, and when they see a complete breakdown of the ways they used culturally interact with each other, that’s something they imitate. Life imitates art – and now art imitates life. Humanity is evolving based upon its mentality – there are some people that want to take mankind to another level – or maybe return to another level. And there are some people that want to create a xenophobic society where we are always tormented by the idea that something is going to come destroy us. But we exploit these things all the time. People in California, they hate immigrants. A’ight, you go pick your own fucking strawberries, take care of your own kids and wash your own clothes. Politically, what do you consider yourself? From the bottom up, I’ve always been more a realist than anything else. I agree with certain principals of socialism, but I keep my idealism in strict check. I live in Harlem, I live in the streets – I know what you can do and there are certain steps to do it. We speak about Revolution, but it’s a process, that’s not an instant. Oh yeah, now we’re free. Come on, man, it’s more about economic planning, strategical, political…a coming together of the people. Once you have economic control, what’s left is political control. Without having any identity, any sense of who you are and what you people’s history is and what you’ve contributed to the world as Black and Latino people, how could you possibly have that mentality to be successful at having a business around your way or having some sort of political group that makes a difference in your community. All we’ve heard about over the last year is war. Why do you think Hip-Hop has been so silent on the issue? I don’t think Hip-Hop in general, I think mainstream Hip-Hop, formula Hip-Hop that they put on the radio has been kept that way. And I think there’s a clear indication who’s pulling the strings because, in the underground, I’ve seen a lot of dissent. Whether I go out to the Bay, or Harlem or Brooklyn, out in Chicago; there’s a lot of emcees out there that are spitting stuff that would contradict the idea that people get from watching the news. We have the stupidest President in the world. Be real, yo. People think Hip-Hop they think 106 and Park and MTV, they don’t think kids on the street. In other places, Hip-Hop is music, but here in New York, Hip-Hop is a culture. We do live in something of an alternative universe compared to the majority of America. Everybody hate on New York because we’re the mecca of Hip-Hop, some call it the capital of the world and whatnot. But at the same time, now everybody stands with us all of the sudden after we have a certain tragedy. People around the country look at Rudy Guilinani and say ‘he’s a great man’ because he did his job for one day. I’m not trying to take away anything he did on that day and in the crisis, but to say that he’s not accountable for any of the other things…it’s just taking things for face value. For example, on the news, I think something that’s really lacking is any sort of historical perspective on 9-11 and the war, on the chemical weapons we gave Saddam Hussein. And even if the excuse is used that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, then come to terms with that – if terrorism is a bad thing, come to terms with the fact that this country, the pentagon especially, has used to terrorism for its own political agendas. The list of assassination attempts by the CIA is long. Exactly, we start talking about a religion or a culture. We can talk about militant people that commit acts in the name of Allah, but if we start talking about that have committed atrocities towards humanity in the name of Jesus Christ, we’d be here ‘til I was old and gray. Are you a conspiracy theorist? I’ve heard a lot of ridiculous things about 9-11 like Jews not showing up to work and Bush masterminding it. Those types of things I can’t agree with – Bush is way to stupid to mastermind anything like 9-11. People take it extremes with some of these things. But I think that there are a lot of unanswered questions…if people keep asking…it begins the process of saying ‘you know what? Maybe it’s not the way they’re telling it on TV.’ If I could cause a discussion with the people around be, then I’ve done what I set out to do. All we’ve heard about over the past year has been the war. Mainstream Hip-Hop has said almost nothing. I think people speak on things in different ways – some people do it through hiphop, some people understand their market. I think a lot of rappers understand their market. Take the Dixie Chicks for example – your audience is a bunch of ignorant redneck people that fly the confederate flag and you’re disagreeing with things the Republican President said – did you expect a different result? Did you expect people not to burn your record? Did you expect to change a multi-million dollar media enterprise – a conglomerate of people that manipulate opinions around this country when some of those statements were made in a London newspaper? When you combine the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government with the media, it’s a powerful force. I had a song called “The Fourth Branch” that was actually one of the reasons I lost my distribution in the first place. The whole idea behind the joint was that you’ve got all these branches put there in a system of checks and balances. Now imagine if all three had the same objective and they had the same direction. Then there would be nobody to check or balance anybody. So if corporations influence politics and they influence the economy, naturally, because they’re a part of it, wouldn’t they be able to influence every aspect of it. The only thing that could keep them in check would be the independent press, someone who actually reported about what goes on. The press now is just the government’s rubber stamp. [The artwork for Immortal Technique’s album is an illustration of former President George Bush, President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tom Ridge and Osama bin Laden sitting in the Oval Office surrounded by piles of money – with bullet holes through their heads.] Was [the art] the reason you lost your distribution? They didn’t know about that yet. That came because I was like, ‘fuck it, if I’m going to lose it, I’m going to go down in flames.” Who was the distributor? You know what, I’m not even going to blow them up right now. But believe me, real real soon your time is coming, you faggot-ass bitch nigga. It’s going to come. I’m gonna to fuck you up and everybody in that little office. But for now it’s Caroline, and they’re very very nice and was intelligent enough and didn’t have a lack of vision like some other people. They definitely showed love. You’ve been happy with Caroline so far? As soon as I have a complaint, you’ll be the first to hear. Nah, I’ll probably settle things in private if I have an issue. But yeah, they’ve been real good. I realized that spitting rhymes in the booth is probably the easiest part of making a record. That’s why when people complain about the industry and they like ‘my label’s fucking me and I’m getting 17 cents a record’ – I’m like ‘they’re doing all the work!’ You went in the booth and worked for like an hour. You didn’t sit through the mixdowns, you didn’t do none of the marketing, you’re barely going on tour, they gave you a huge advance, you didn’t bother to fill out your own ASCAP forms so how do you expect to have any fucking publishing. I reach out to everybody. Before I had a PR agent it was just me. When you were a battle emcee, did you have the same focus on politics? I just wanted to destroy you…That’s just the way I grew up rhyming, my style was based in a hardcore element. As it evolved, just like a kid matures, at one point he’s arguing with his little friends and joking around – as he gets older he starts thinking and arguing about things that make sense instead of scuffling over video games. You said you spent some time in jail. What happened? Basically, when I was in high school living Uptown…I never got rid of that mentality when I went to college, which was my mistake. I was still doing the type of stupid things that I was doing as a kid. Robbing, stealing, getting into fights over nothing – on some hoodlum shit, basically…Me and eight of my niggas showing up to a party like ‘you think it’s all love, here? Fuck this keg-party we ‘bout to shut this shit down, take the keg, grab these two bitches, we leaving.’ I was completely not focused on what I should have been doing. In that instance it was just a matter of time before I ran into that type of failure. It wasn’t jail that did that for me, it was seeing my family go through that experience, watching my mother put her hand up on the glass and she can’t be near me. I realized what I was doing to family and I wasn’t contributing anything to my people. When I got out, I was focused on it. I saw battling as a rite of passage into the underground – as a way of saying ‘you gonna respect me, ‘cause I can take your fucking head off.’ If you don’t like what I have to say, then after the show, you can try your luck. I can take it back to the jail days and beat you senseless or we can battle in the street and you can lose and look stupid in front of your peoples. I didn’t really take it seriously until I got out of jail. I’ve always rhymed, probably since I was eight or nine years old. Back when they used to just spin breakbeats on the radio before everybody started yelling over them. Harlem has a rich history of intellectualism, but we haven’t seen much from Hip-Hop artists such as Cam’ron or Dipset. It’s hard to bracket me. If you take me just for the hardcore stuff and the raw style that I have, you’re going to miss out on all the things I’m trying to speak on. But if you try to brand me as a ‘conscious’ rapper, then all of the sudden you try to market it to that crowd and they’re like ‘this dude is violent and crazy -- that’s not Hip-Hop.’ Shut the fuck up, yo. I look at it like this, there’s good Hip-Hop and there’s bad Hip-Hop. If you people call me ‘political rap’, then what do I call you? You make songs about selling crack and killing people – is that ‘kill-hop’ or ‘crack-hop’? What is it then? It’s just music. If you really went through that, that you had to sell crack to support you family, speaking on it is one thing, but put that into perspective. Anybody can live life but there;s only certain peoiple that can find meaning in it. I’ve seen some of my friends hustle – they have no other job, nobody’s trying to hire them. I remember getting out of jail; nobody wanted to hire me. Every where I went, everybody slammed the door in my face. ‘No, no, no’ – ‘til I lied on my resume and finally got a job. I wasn’t going to go back to hustling because I’ve already seem that destroy people’s lives. I think was one of the only positive things that came out of that – I seen people doing twenty, thirty years for possession. Not even for some violent stuff, just having some coke on ‘em. Goodbye, thirty years. Did you finish up school, you seem like a Sociology major. When I got out, I do two things. I went to the Puerto Rican Day Parade and I register for classes at CUNY. I went back to school and changed my major to Political Science, which seemed a whole lot more fitting. I have about a semester left but it keeps getting delayed because I’m doing so much with the music. That’s definitely one of my goals in the next couple years, to take them online or at night. Check http://viperrecords.com for more information on Immortal Technique. Revolutionary Vol. 1 and Revolutionary Vol. 2 in stores now. Read more articles in Arts » |
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