“Don’t leave this room saying ‘this rapper named M1 just hollered at me for a little while,’” said M1 to the crowd of students, activists, and local hip-hop heads packed into the auditorium. “You gonna miss the whole point if you sit here and look at me and consider me only a rapper. I’m not only that, I’m your comrade, I’m an organizer, I soak it all up, I’m a student of our communities, I’m a father, so that makes me a teacher. I’m here to make revolution. I’m here to bring revolution. . .I’m here looking in the crowd for the glare in the eye of the next Che Guevara.”

M1 was on the University of Colorado campus—one of the most privileged places in the country—after spending the previous day in the 9th ward in New Orleans. He said nothing about the disparity between the two places; it didn’t seem to matter. The agenda, whether the students were rich or poor, was “correct political education.”

If you love hip hop, you’ll remember where you were and what you were doing the first time you heard the album Lets Get Free from Dead Prez. From that opening saw-tooth bassline and the refrain “It’s bigger than hip-hop” you knew this was something visionary, revolutionary.

Seeing M1 then (half of Dead Prez) for the first time, not on stage but in a lecture hall with physics formulas still on the chalkboard behind him, was one of many beautiful ironies that afternoon. There were the four Black Panthers who stood behind him as guards, each wearing a screw-face, but one—surely as star struck as the rest of us—who broke ranks for a few seconds before the lecture began to pull out a camera and take pictures. There was a bespectacled professor in his 60s greeting the crowd of students around him with “wussup?” There were bookish girls with laptops and rectangular glasses, Barbies with spray-on tans, and Abercrombie and Fitch-wearing longboarders. There were artists there, wrestlers, musicians, writers: all of us there to hear this man wearing desert camouflage and a military cap with a red star and the word Cuba. And there were the fucking security cameras along the balconies, filming us all.

As much as I hate to say it, I had the same problems with M1’s talk as I did reading Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, a book with a similar message: we need to organize and make revolution now. Ok, fine. Hell-yeah. But how? Neither of them said exactly.

But as in the case of Jensen’s work, the points raised by M1 are critical for us to begin even trying to understand our nation’s history, the connections between what happened in the past and where we are today.

Here are some of the things M1 said:

In 1992, 93 I was listening to Dr. Dre, Snoop, Tupac—Wu Tang was just about to come out—and after hearing about [Black power organizer] Fred Hampton Sr., these people couldn’t even be in my conscious anymore; I couldn’t hear them no more; all I could hear was ‘you can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill a revolution.’ Read More...