Dead Prez: Interview

05 November, 2009
by: Miguel Cullen

Political hip hop act Dead Prez have collaborated with Jay-Z, Nas and Chuck D; been signed by Sony and are behind one of the biggest hip hop tunes in history. Before their gig in KOKO on Friday, Miguel spoke to one half of the American duo - M1 about radicalism, Nick Griffin and being held hostage in Cairo.

Daniel Finkelstein, an Associate Editor of The Times wrote a piece on the eve of Obama's election about the key difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, arguing that while Martin Luther King's non-violence moved mountains, Malcolm X's violent quest for segregation made him wholly ineffectual.

Dead Prez's M1 gets his name from the brand of carbine that Malcolm X used in his iconic Life Magazine photo and his politics are suitably militant. However no one can accuse the group behind 'Hip-Hop' - perhaps the most recognisable tune in the history of rap - of lacking reach.

Dead Prez's daring takes them beyond the usual agitators. In the US where blacks are more empowered, lyrics like "F*ck welfare - we say reparations" may be less shocking; here their show at KOKO this Friday may make some feel uncomfortable. However this is not to say that their politics have left them marginalised - M1 and his DP partner Stic.man have worked with Jay-Z, Nas and Chuck D, been signed to Sony and feature on every kid's rap crash course.

Speaking to me from Atlanta, Georgia, M1 is everything you'd expect: polite, with an excessive formality that you feel is overcompensating, slick (he manages to arrange a special delivery package while on the phone) and with a practiced capacity for rigorous political debate.

"I went to college in Tallahassee, Florida and we're still seeing burning crosses. In the north there's a contrast, although the same things are happening. There they won't call you a n***er to your face, they'll call you a n***er behind your back."

I ask him what car he drives, probing for a Cristal socialist: a Nissan, it seems, before he lost his license. However contrarily he seems rather abashed at driving such a pimped-down car, and I wonder whether he envies the no-qualms hustling of Jay-Z. He is adamant, however, that he doesn't regret the associations of his radicalism: "Does it put me in the room with questionable characters? No. It puts me in a room with people who use critical thinking to help them arrive at new conclusions. My support for Hugo Chávez (he went recently to Venezuela to perform with K'naan) is heartfelt. The jury is still out on whether Chavez is corrupt as he is fighting a monumentally corrupt, imperialist government, the US."

It will be less surprising to you now that M1 has been hanging out with George Galloway: he went on a mission to Gaza this summer to deliver supplies to bombed-out Palestinians, and had an eventful time: "We were held hostage in their hotel in Cairo. They wouldn't let us leave and had no intention of us reaching Gaza. There was a suspicious looking security detail following us about, watching us to make sure they didn't do anything." The 100-strong group then discovered a spy in their meeting room: "It was George Galloway himself who identified the informant, an Egyptian-looking man sitting at the back of the room taking notes. When we discovered him it became very inflammatory and almost resulted in physical violence."

M1 is looking forward to riling up KOKO against Nick Griffin, saying coolly "This is war. Sometimes they call it a war on poverty, sometimes they call it a war on crime, immigration - which means a war on poor and oppressed people - these are tactics of war.

The group have a new album/mixtape out now, called Pulse of the People: Turn off your Vol. 3, produced by ex-Eminem DJ, Green Lantern. Chuck D features, and with its rough and ready, obvious-samples style, bears the hallmarks of an underground tape. One of the great tracks on it is 'Afrika Hot!' with a Misirlou-style guitar, a chorus sung in a mixture of Swahili and Arabic and laments about black, post-Obama plight. Another track '$timulus Plan' blames Bush for money he gave to banks without considering individuals.

Critics claimed that with this album DP were mellowing with age, a claim that M1 counters: "I am still a revolutionary with goals like the complete annihilation of capitalism by any means necessary, but we are strategists as to how to get to our goal. We reach different people by different means. Pulse of the People was more of a snapshot - we wanted to give people our personality and our rhymes. It was more of a day in the life of M1 and Stic.man. Our next album, Information Age has been in the pipeline for a year and a half. It's a different kind of production it will be more up beat - a more synthesized sound."

Although Dead Prez's politics smack of Malcolm X segregation, the crowd at the last Dead Prez concert I went to was mainly white. The usual hilarious sight of a few hundred middle-class students experiencing the contact thrill of militant black activism ensued, although it has to be said when the subterranean squelch of 'Hip-Hop' entered, politics were forgotten and the music endured.

Dead Prez plays KOKO on Friday 6th November

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