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    Hip-Hop Nation: Mixtape Revolution? Xan West February 6, 2012

    A Review of I MIX WHAT I LIKE! A MIXTAPE MANIFESTO
    by Jared Ball
    AK Press, 2011

    “The ability to determine which forms of cultural expression are widely disseminated and which are not is purely ideological and serves a colonizing purpose”- Jared Ball, I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto

    I have a confession.  I’ve most likely seen every episode, reunion and thrown down of Love & Hip-Hop.  Critical consciousness intact, I sit guilty and mesmerized by one solid hour of television dedicated to black women man chasing, trash talking and fist fighting.  For months I’ve tried to analyze what it could be about me, my homies, and apparently a large segment of the nation that, though we know it is wrong, can’t seem to look away.  Many of us use a train wreck analogy to justify our attraction to such a rachet show: I can’t look away because I want to see how bad it gets. 

    However we justify it to ourselves, most of us rely on personal responsibility and question ourselves: why do I have this sick obsession?  But, I began to notice Love & Hip-Hop and the weave-pulling drama that goes with it, is always on the air—morning, after school, nighttime, and that’s not even the marathons. If one is to turn on VH1, Love& Hip-Hop is what’s on.  The other music channels are not much better.

    Jared Ball’s I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto properly places Black America as a colonized people within a nation, and therefore recognizes a colonized hip-hop nation within this colony.  

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    Casualties of Commerce Hena Ashraf April 15, 2011

    PEEPLI LIVEBY ANUSHA RIZVIAamir Khan Productions, 2010

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    Punjabi Gypsy Hip-Hop Rebellion Sonny Singh April 15, 2011

    POOR PEOPLES PLANET
    BY MANDEEP SETHI
    http://mandeepsethi.bandcamp.com, 2011

    With an unmistakably laid-back West Coast hip-hop sound, 22 year-old Mandeep Sethi brings us Poor Peoples Planet—an album that is dynamic, and often incendiary while maintaining mellow Bay Area vibes. The San Francisco-based Sikh rapper—inspired by the gypsy hip-hop teachings of the crew Xitanos Matematikos, and the history of gypsies from Punjab—flows over meditative and haunting melodies and samples that are not typical for a hip-hop record.

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    Snapshot of an Artist - Revolutionary Poetics Various Authors June 1, 2010

    I always tell people that at the end of the day, I don't consider myself either a poet or a writer as much as a healer. The mechanics of grammar bore me. I am much more interested in transmuting healing energy to ear, page, and fingers...in creating something that can be sensed whether it's on a page or on CD. My desire is to share spirit in a multitude of forms that free.
    -Yolo Akili

    Yolo Akili is a queer feminist organizer, a founder of the southern Gay Men's collective Sweet Tea and a trainer with Men Stopping Violence.

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    Other Worlds are Possible: Visionary Fiction, Culture and Organizing Walidah Imarisha Janurary/February 2010

    I think I would have always believed in revolutionary change, and believed in the power of people to organize for that change. But without visionary fiction, I don’t think I would have had the imagination or the permission to actually see and touch and feel what that new world could look like. How will we live? What will we eat? How will we interact with each other? What will gender and racial and class relationships look like? How will children be raised? How will we deal with aggression and violence and war?

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