[Hip-hop was rooted in politics and social justice and a diversity
of voices. But now, at 50, has it become a minstrel show? ]
[[link removed]]

HIP-HOP — AND AMERICA — ARE CHANGING, AND NOT FOR THE BETTER  
[[link removed]]


 

Kevin Powell
September 17, 2023
Politico
[[link removed]]


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_ Hip-hop was rooted in politics and social justice and a diversity
of voices. But now, at 50, has it become a minstrel show? _

,

 

_“I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees”
—_ROBERT JOHNSON, “Cross Road Blues”

_“Let me just take a second/
Just got a lot to get off my chest”
—_MEGAN THEE STALLION, “Anxiety”

I am hip-hop. I was born and raised in a ghetto, a now 50-something
Black man from one of America’s many inner cities weighted down by
racism, poverty, violence, neglect, dreams deferred, desperate
survival tactics, ugly police-community dynamics and, on constant
repeat, hopelessness. This is why so many Black males across three
generations utter these words to any who will listen: _Hip-hop saved
my life_.

Because, quite literally, at least for me, it did. There would be no
16 books, no endless speech invites, no journalism career, no sojourn
as a poet, and no traveling America and parts of the world if it were
not for hip-hop. It gave me permission to use my voice, to probe why I
was Black and straight outta poverty; and hip-hop taught me to strive
for something, anything, against all odds. _Hip-hop saved my life_.
It is simply not debatable for a nation of millions of us.

What is debatable is when hip-hop began. Yes, hip-hop can mark Aug.
11, 1973 — 50 years ago this summer — as the day it all jumped
off, when West Indian immigrants Cindy Campbell and her brother Clive
Campbell, AKA DJ Kool Herc [[link removed]], threw a
back-to-school party in the community room of their 1520 Sedgwick Ave.
building in the South Bronx, New York City. For years though, some
hip-hop heads, me included, believed it was actually November of 1974,
up in the Bronx, per the Universal Zulu Nation and another founding
figure of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa
[[link removed]].
Later, I’m told, it was Bambaataa who decided, in a closed-door
meeting, that the origin story should point toward Herc and Cindy and
1973 instead.

But I believe it is deeper than squabbles over this or that date. In
1967, six years before Sedgwick Avenue, a couple of significant things
happened. One, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. broke with the
heart and soul of the Civil Rights Movement, and boldly came out
against war [[link removed]], declaring
that the United States was sending poor Blacks and poor whites to
fight poor Asian people in a place called Vietnam, and that America
was the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth. The Nobel Peace
Prize-winning King was blasted as a traitor and unpatriotic.

And second, Kool Herc arrived from Jamaica that same year, making his
way to the Bronx, the anointed and undisputed homeland of hip-hop. One
year later King would be dead, assassinated, but not before he began
to spread the gospel of a “Poor People’s Campaign,”
[[link removed]] a crusade
for folks like the poor African Americans, West Indians and Puerto
Ricans in the Bronx who would later give birth to hip-hop. These were
people from the very same class King warned us not to abandon and
forget. In other words, what does it matter if you can sit anywhere on
the bus, or at a lunch counter, if you have no money to ride the bus,
no money to buy a burger?

That means hip-hop, from the very beginning, had one humble
definition: _Making something from nothing_. From its inception,
hip-hop was rooted in politics, in social justice, by virtue of the
fact that the four core elements of the culture — deejaying,
dancing, rapping and graffiti writing — were a middle-finger
response to racism and classism, to white flight from urban centers
like New York and Compton, to being abandoned, forgotten and erased,
just like Black history and Black books, say, are being erased,
banned, whitewashed, in states like Ron DeSantis’ Florida in 2023.

I remember what hip-hop made me feel — and think — when I first
heard The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979
[[link removed]]; or when I first saw
graffiti on entire subways; or when I first danced to the beats that
were not those of my mother’s Motown or James Brown,  but residue
of those sounds that we, like mad scientists, broke apart, recycled,
chopped, cut and scratched, until we had something that was
spectacularly ours. _Making something from nothing_. I felt free,
alive, that in spite of the impoverished conditions under which my
single mother and I lived, I finally had music, art forms, a culture
that belonged uniquely to me. I tagged graffiti with my Magic Marker.
I learned how to pop and lock and break dance, on unfolded cardboard
boxes, on unkind concrete. I memorized early rapper rhymes although I
never had the audacity to spit them aloud, except when no one was
looking. I watched my then-best friend construct his own sound system
in his bedroom, intersecting electronics and a hand-made wooden coffin
in which to place his two turntables, with his vinyl records to the
side. And I wore the hats, the shirts, the pants, the jackets, the
coats, the jewelry, and the footwear which have become the uniforms,
the mobile fashion shows, generation to generation, of hip-hop.

Yes, I have been a participant, a documentarian, and an activist
within and around hip-hop culture for 44 of these 50 years. Hip-hop
taught me how to use my voice (Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”)
[[link removed]], and hip-hop taught me
about Black political and cultural rebels like John Coltrane and
Assata Shakur and Nina Simone and Malcolm X. Hip-hop taught me to
question police brutality (N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police”
[[link removed]]), and hip-hop gave me
delectable snippets of Black history absent from my formal education.
Hip-hop instructed me to study jazz (practically anything by A Tribe
Called Quest [[link removed]]), and
hip-hop gave me my first and only full-time job as a writer at Quincy
Jones’ _Vibe_ magazine. Hip-hop led me to pen three cover stories
for _Vibe _about the most famous rapper ever, Tupac Shakur,
[[link removed]] and
hip-hop has given me so many words and phrases with which to guide my
life to this day.

But as we know, culture, similar to politics, comes in ebbs and flows
of astonishing awareness and activity, and bottomless confusion and
inertia, and that has been no different with hip-hop. Hip-hop was
always party music, with all the good and the not-so-good, that that
entails. But there was also a movement of in-your-face Afrocentric
and Black radical chic hip-hop from the late 1980s to the 1990s,
largely a response to the Reagan Revolution and its awful trickle-down
effects on people of color, that included Public Enemy, X Clan and
KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions. But when Dr. Dre’s landmark
album _The Chronic_ appeared all over MTV in 1993 and sold about 6
million units, it was not just the end of the Black Power era in
hip-hop, but also the beginning of a Hollywood-like reproduction of
the same movie over and over again.

Today, in 2023, three decades since _The Chronic_, we’ve gone from
fighting the power to recreating and mass-producing the worst aspects
of that hugely successful record: endless use of the n-word for Black
people; endless use of the b-word for women; a seemingly endless
hatred for queer and transgender people; an intense obsession with
guns, with violence in all forms, with drug-selling and drug-taking,
with money and material things; and anti-anything that even remotely
questions the images and words we put forth.

Scan closely the _Billboard_ pop and hip-hop charts from early 1993
forward and, with a few exceptions, it is the same formula for hip-hop
success: across U.S. presidents and technology innovations and
generations of us, from Rodney King to George Floyd, from Death Row
Records to Tekashi69 [[link removed]], from
Tupac and Biggie to podcasts and the murder of Pop Smoke
[[link removed]]:
Black self-hatred, hatred of women, destroy, self-destruct, kill or be
killed, anything for a dollar, even if it leads to real-life drama, or
murder. Gone, for the most part, is the agitating for political
change, the diversity of voices; instead, rap’s activist roots have
been completely eclipsed by its lowest common denominator: nihilism
and greed.

Meanwhile, the few rappers that do get political are frolicking with
far-right Republicans like it’s no big deal. We see Ice Cube driving
former Fox News Channel anchor Tucker Carlson, who has spread racist
conspiracy theories and stoked white fear, around the ‘hood, with
nary a care about the optics of the act — the same Ice Cube who
co-wrote N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police,” and became a megastar as one
of those early 1990s rappers speaking out against injustice. We see
Kanye West, now known as Ye, wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap
and declaring his love for Donald Trump. And we see Kanye running for
president and espousing despicable antisemitism, among many other
choice, far-right misadventures.

Over the years, hip-hop has spawned a generation of rap-influenced
politicians and activists, from Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka to
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to Rep. Maxwell Frost
(D-Fla.) to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) to Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.).
(And I myself even ran for Congress in Brooklyn, N.Y., unsuccessfully,
in 2008 and 2010.) But it pains me that you don’t see that same
fight-the-power spirit reflected in today’s music.

IT WOULD BE A LIE to say that hip-hop has not always been a party
music, a music supremely popular with young people of every generation
since the 1970s, when it has been just that. But it has also seen epic
and provocative political statements during that period we call the
Golden Era of hip-hop, roughly 1984-1998, from the rise of Run-DMC 
[[link removed]]as hip-hop’s first
super group, to the otherworldly success of the album _The
Miseducation of Lauryn Hill_
[[link removed]],
arguably the most important and enduring hip-hop-inspired record ever.

There was no such thing, not to us within the culture during the
Golden Era, as political rap, as gangster rap, as conscious rap, any
of that. Much of these were terms coined by certain kinds of media,
namely mainstream outlets not rooted in the culture, which is partly
why I started writing about hip-hop myself. It was _all_ hip-hop,
and just like George Orwell once said everything is political, there
was no need for us to separate hip-hop into categories. The very fact
that Black and Latinx young people were expressing themselves freely,
with their music, dance and visual art, was by its very nature
political. Which is why it was not unusual for a wide array of
artists, during this Golden Era, to have at least one song per album
that waxed poetic about a political or social justice issue, be
it Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex”
[[link removed]] or Queen Latifah’s
“U.N.I.T.Y.” [[link removed]] or De
La Soul’s “Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa.”
[[link removed]] Why? Because hip-hop
has also always been the voice of the invisible, the unheard, the
ignored. And there is simply no way a culture born during the
upheavals of post-Civil Rights and post-Vietnam America could be
promoting anti-social messages; not a culture that also traveled
through the dark periods of crack, AIDS, Reagan and Bush policies,
remarkably easy access to guns in our ‘hoods, the bloody eruption of
gang warfare and the prison-industrial complex. So, in these highly
polarized times, why aren’t we seeing that same political push
today?

I believe that hip-hop, beginning with its explosion as the dominant
pop art in America, and globally, in the early 1990s, was also
co-opted, commodified, turned into something else. I recall vividly
Tupac Shakur, during one of our interviews for _Vibe_, complaining
about the record label execs who told him political or socially
conscious hip-hop was not selling any longer, that he was essentially
wasting his time making that sort of music.

Actually, “that sort of music” sold quite well, as mere months
before Dr. Dre’s _The Chronic_ dropped, the politically minded
Arrested Development album _3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life
Of…_ [[link removed]]_ _was released,
selling 4 million units. So, who decided that socially conscious rap
didn’t sell, and why would someone say that to Tupac Shakur, the son
of former Black Panther Party member Afeni Shakur, who named her son
after Tupac Amaru, the legendary South American revolutionary? I
remember thinking it was, well, odd, that roughly at the beginning of
the Bill and Hillary Clinton years in the White House suddenly the
politics and social justice messages in the music were gone,
mysteriously. Did rappers, including Tupac, methodically become mostly
or completely apolitical?

With Tupac, coming from poverty as most of us did, he made a conscious
choice: put the politics to the side so he could make real money. But
that phase of his career would be short-lived. In 1996, a scant three
months after his 25th birthday, the artist was gunned down on the Las
Vegas strip, his killer remaining free — and unknown — to this
day. As for the others, I believe hip-hop had become dangerous to
some, in politics, in corporate America, at record labels, in the
media, when rappers began to interrogate the political system, and
this country’s warts from uncompromisingly honest angles, when some
dared to confront the status quo — as Dr. King had done a generation
before.

And not only was that opposition reaching and educating the Black and
Latinx young people who founded hip-hop in the first place, but also
white young people, Asian young people, Indigenous young
people,_ all _young people, who otherwise were not, and still are
not, learning much of anything about Black and Latinx folks in their
homes, in their communities, in their schools, from the news media.
Or, put another way, the erasing of the politics from mainstream
hip-hop is not all that different from someone deciding that certain
kinds of books, and certain kinds of history lessons, have to be
banned, removed from schools, state by state, because of what young
people might start to think, and feel, and challenge, and also _do_.
I’ve traveled the world, and I cannot begin to tell you how many
people, of all identities, told me it was hip-hop that taught them
hard truths about America.

So, alas, and tragically, what hip-hop has been turned into, mostly,
post-1998-era Lauryn Hill, has been a modern-day version of
America’s long love affair with the minstrel show
[[link removed]],
that diabolical and inhumane and extremely profitable brand of
entertainment that said Black folks were ugly, dumb, lazy, useless,
violent, dangerous, overly sexualized, prone to be perpetual children
and totally lacking in any morals whatsoever. Minstrelsy was the
dominant entertainment in America for about 100 years, with racist
stereotypes that did major damage to Black people, and by extension to
every nook of America. Just like the past 25-plus years or so of these
stereotypical hip-hop lyrics and images on a loop have done major
damage to large chunks of the very communities that built hip-hop, and
by extension to every nook of America. Ultimately, racism hurts all of
us.

IF YOU GREW UP POOR and deprived, as I did, self-hating and
self-defeating, as I was, there were no balanced images of you in your
education — or, as Lauryn Hill declared, your “miseducation”—
no seeing yourself as a whole human being in history, math, science,
literature, nowhere at all. And, if, like me, you only get to see
yourself in the popular culture of your times, you will, inevitably,
see yourself as ugly, vile, worthless, an “other.” And you will
come to hate yourself, and hate people who look like you, and believe
in your gut, they, _we,_ are nothing more than the n-word and the
b-word.

Poor people do not want to be poor, and that definitely includes the
poor people who created hip-hop. But as the lucky few — JAY-Z, 50
Cent, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Drake — have transcended and become
global pop and cultural ambassadors, we have to ask at what cost, to
them, to Black America, to Black people worldwide? They all readily
have used the n-word as if it is a first name, middle name, last name.
They all readily thrust themselves headfirst into some of the most
vile and sexist lyrical content imaginable. They all readily have
rapped about violence in some form, casually tossing around toxic
manhood stereotypes as if they were their birthright. They all readily
show(ed) off their money, their material assets, even while the
majority of the communities from which many of them come continue to
struggle financially, just like back in 1973. And they all readily
duck and dodge any political or social justice messages in their
music, with the exception of a very different Kanye, in the 2000s.

If the JAY-Z we see now — with his massive commemorative exhibition
at the Brooklyn Public Library
[[link removed]] —
can be someone who fashions himself after Jean-Michel Basquiat
[[link removed]],
that means he knew better. If 50 Cent can become a multimedia mogul,
that means he knew better. If Kanye West can have a college professor
mother, that means he knew better. If Lil Wayne could be a high school
honors student, as he was, that means he knew better. And if Drake
could be a preppy child actor born and bred in Canada, with a Black
American musician father and a Jewish Canadian schoolteacher mother,
that means he knew better, too. But each of these men, I believe, fell
into line with what was selling records, as Tupac was told, and wound
up becoming the leaders of the pack. Just like women rappers such as
Nikki Minaj and Cardi B and Ice Spice feel they have to literally
strip down, to be what America and the world says Black and Latinx
women are — sex objects, the modern-day Venus Hottentot forever on
display [[link removed]] — in order to
have careers, to have anything, really. _Making something out of
nothing_. Even if that something means selling our souls and our
bodies to make a dollar out of 15 cents.

KENDRICK LAMAR IS DIFFERENT, the way, say, John Lennon of The Beatles
became different, because he began to realize that while hip-hop, yes,
brought him great fame and fortune, he still felt a responsibility to
the people, in the tradition of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti and Woody
Guthrie. That the point of hip-hop was not just to become another
capitalist, this time in rap Blackface, but to actually push back
against the capitalism that has decimated communities like his in
Southern California across generations. As Lauryn Hill determined she
wanted to be who she was on her terms, Kendrick Lamar, who became the
first rap artist to win a Pulitzer
[[link removed]] in 2018, came to
the very same conclusion. But just because Kendrick sold records and
won that Pulitzer does not mean overall his political voice is the
norm in hip-hop. If anything, that award highlights the fact that
there is a vast void between him and most other rappers, a terrible
scenario for the music, for the culture.

That is why it’s a wonder in these very dark political times that a
record like Lamar’s _Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers_
[[link removed]] could
break through the cracks. There he is gut-punching racism, sexism,
adultery, fatherhood, homophobia, even his own depression and suicidal
thoughts. Lamar is not just looking out, but also looking _within_,
as Marvin Gaye did, as Lennon did. What makes Kendrick Lamar such an
exception, and such an anomaly?

Why do the men rappers, men hip-hop radio personalities, men hip-hop
podcast hosts, believe they must be cartoon figures — as we were in
those minstrel shows — to make a bag of money? Why do certain women
rappers believe they have to sell their bodies to make a name for
themselves, including someone as thoughtful and intelligent and
resilient as Megan Thee Stallion, she of a college education and
an op-ed in _The New York Times_
[[link removed]]?
There’s a thin line between sexual liberation, which I support 100
percent, and pimpin’ yourself.

Better yet, if we can agree that America itself was founded on racism
and sexism and classism, that means that any culture we’ve witnessed
ascend to the skies, be it jazz or rock and roll or hip-hop, will most
assuredly be a mirror of where our society is on any given day. The
hard-core reality is that while women have been a part of hip-hop from
the very beginning, be it Cindy Campbell with the official first
event, or Sylvia Robinson, the head of Sugar Hill Records who put out
“Rapper’s Delight,” the first commercial hit, there is no
denying hip-hop has largely been a male-dominated culture. This is so
evident in this 50th anniversary year of hip-hop when major
celebrations like the Rock The Bells Festival in Queens, N.Y., and the
massive Yankee Stadium tribute in the Bronx revealed how little women
rappers are regarded, relegating most of the women performers, even
the unconquerable MC Lyte
[[link removed]], to the early part of
the concerts, when hardly any audience was present. Then there’s the
recent sentencing of rapper Tory Lanez, who savagely shot Megan Thee
Stallion in her feet; before he was convicted, Megan had to withstand
much social media abuse, and also nasty dis record lyrics from Drake
[[link removed]].

Moreover, this is not merely a generational thing, as some older
hip-hop heads are quick to suggest when trashing, say, hip-hop of this
year, of the past decade, of this century. The sexism and toxic lyrics
toward women and girls (not to mention rappers accused of physical and
sexual assault) was there in the 1970s and the 1980s and the
1990s; this is not just some recent hip-hop music thing. Or, as the
scholar bell hooks
[[link removed]] once
said to me long before she died, when she listened to a lot of the
hip-hop-inspired Black music she felt that Black men, specifically —
the de facto faces and heads of hip-hop — hate(d) Black women.

A painful thing to hear, but as we say, where is the lie?

WHERE HIP-HOP WAS supposed to be a vehicle that challenged
oppression, discrimination, hatred and enthusiastic ignorance, we’ve
become a gas pump filling the tank of oppression, discrimination,
hatred and enthusiastic ignorance. God bless Snoop Dogg for
re-inventing himself, again and again. But why is the same Snoop Dogg
who attended MTV’s Video Music Awards in the 1990s with young women
of color on leashes as if they were dogs, now in his 50s, onstage at
Yankee Stadium in 2023, with one barely-dressed young woman of color
after another sliding up and down a stripper pole? Apparently, his
reinvention went only so far.

This is the crossroads hip-hop is at as we celebrate hip-hop at 50. To
paraphrase a Tupac Shakur line, we were given this world, we did not
make it [[link removed]]. True, indeed,
true enough. But this anniversary should not just be a moment for
glossy celebrations. The question, right now, we should all be asking
ourselves about hip-hop is pretty basic: What other people, anywhere
on this earth, are allowed, encouraged, under the guise of being
legit, real, to call themselves the rough equivalent of the n-word or
the b-word, watch it be recorded, mixed, mastered and spread
everywhere, like Covid, for the entire world to digest? What has
happened, politically, socially, within hip-hop, has, in some ways,
set us back as much as far-right politics.

This is also why we can point to any popular hip-hop podcast with this
rapper or that hip-hop adjacent figure, and behold conversational
mayhem, old and new beefs and threats of violence reminiscent of the
worst of Jerry Springer’s talk show. There is hip-hop _culture_,
which was erected to be about life and light and possibilities. And
then there is the hip-hop _industry_, which traffics in death and
destruction. Is it any wonder that since the murders of Tupac and
Biggie in 1996 and 1997, respectively, there have literally been
murders of one rapper or another pretty much every year since 2001?
Most were shot, the majority of the cases unsolved, yet the music —
thanks to those who distribute and highlight it — still pushes
violence and chaos, like it’s no big deal.

We in America love to celebrate anniversaries, sometimes too soon, too
prematurely. America is also at a crossroads, politically, socially:
Do we believe in peace, love, democracy and respect for each other? Or
do we believe in violence, hate, division and fear? I, too, am at a
crossroads, of my hip-hop life past and my hip-hop life present,
wondering how I — we — got here. I am both so incredibly happy and
likewise so incredibly sad that hip-hop has made it to 50 years old.
Happy because it is my culture. I have been a hip-hop head for life,
and like hip-hop I, too, have made it to my 50s, even when naysayers
said I would not, that _we_ would not. Sad because I feel my
mortality. I feel my bones quaking every single time I hear of the
death of local folks, or of famous hip-hop folks like DMX
[[link removed]], like
Shock G
[[link removed]], like
Coolio
[[link removed]].
We ducked and dodged the madness of our youth, only to be felled in
middle age.

I think of how surreal it is that we now have hip-hop millionaires
and billionaires
[[link removed]].
But I also ponder how that is any different than the mostly white and
wealthy social class in America — the 1 percent — who are good
while multitudes around them struggle? I think of the very cities
where hip-hop was first incubated, how they have been ridiculously
gentrified, and there is a pandemic of homelessness coast to coast,
unlike anything we’ve seen since The Great Depression — and how a
growing number of the homeless are younger Black males. Who is
speaking to and for them? How is the flaunting of riches by certain
people in hip-hop any different from the Elon Musks of the world, out
for self, not for we, the people?

Equally, hip-hop needs more of a Chance The Rapper speaking
passionately about mental health issues
[[link removed]],
more of a Tobe Nwigwe sitting shoulder to shoulder with his wife and
children and community members in his music videos
[[link removed]], more of the balanced
and righteous spirit of Curtis Mayfield and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez
and The Staple Singers. Have a career, yes, make your bag, yes, but
care about something other than social media likes and poppin’
bottles at parties.

Some might say I’m a dreamer, and I will accept that, but for me the
answers lie on that hot and sweaty Friday afternoon of this year 2023,
August 11th, when my wife and I decided to take a pilgrimage up to
1520 Sedgwick Ave., the assumed birthplace of hip-hop. To our surprise
only a few were there, diehard hip-hop heads like us. Most folks were
heading to Yankee Stadium for the Hip-Hop 50 live concert. We passed
on that. We wanted instead to be on this narrow strip of the South
Bronx, where you could see local residents hustling trinkets and cool
drinks near the front entrance of the apartment building where they
say it all began.

Down the street a bit were mounds of trash and the homeless, camped
out against graffitied walls. On this little plot of history, I met a
young white man from Austria, only in his 20s, whose name I cannot
recall. It was his first time in New York City, he told me, adding
that he has been a hip-hop head since a boy, just like me, and had
decided he had to be here on this day. It warmed my heart as this
young man, born long after hip-hop crawled its way into the universe,
told me his story, how hip-hop, too, saved his life, gave him a voice,
a purpose, spoke to his soul, as it had done for me decades before. I
marveled at how this culture, this art form born of resistance,
created by Black and Latinx people, could be so glorious and beautiful
and layered that it could touch someone so profoundly. So much so that
this young white man felt compelled to find his way to the Bronx,
because he needed to see for himself the community that built Planet
Hip-hop. 

If there is any grace, and mercy, for hip-hop today, it is that we
take pride in the fact that something we created from nothing in the
ghettos of America has transfixed people, across identities and
regions worldwide, that this young man from Austria knew his life
mattered, because hip-hop — two turntables, a microphone, spray
paint, and dance moves copied here, there, everywhere — had told him
so. Just as it had done for me, way back in the day.

_Kevin Powell is a poet, human and civil rights activist, filmmaker,
hip-hop historian, and author of 16 books, including The Kevin Powell
Reader, his collected writings. His 17th book will be a biography of
Tupac Shakur. And his new spoken word poetry album, Grocery Shopping
With My Mother, is available on all music streaming platforms._

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