Acclaimed rapper, hip hop artist, poet, teacher and social activist Mic Crenshaw, who has just issued a new album, “Under the Sun,” takes to the airwaves on July 19, starting at 10:00 pm. Barbara LaMorticella listens to and talks with Mic and with Mic’s collabator, singer and songwriter Jana Losey.
Mic moved to Portland in 1992 from Minneapolis, where he was involved in teaching and in high stakes organizing against the 1980’s rising tide of racist skinheads. For many years in Minneapolis he participated in an underground, sometimes violent struggle against the
skinheads, and was instrumental in the creation of the Anti Racist Action group and the famous anti-racist skinhead crew The Baldies. After years of pressure and violence, he moved to Portland to find a new beginning. It was while working as a landscape gardener here that he turned to writing and music. “I needed an outlet. I felt that I could write and perform. I had a lot of things to say,” he told Portland Mercury’s Graham Berry. Berry added: “That comment right there could go down in history as one of the greatest understatements ever spoken, right up with ‘George W. Bush was a shitty president’ and ‘doughnuts are tasty.’”
Mic quickly became a prize-winning Slam Artist, and has been founder and driving force of a half a dozen hip-hop bands, including Cleveland Steamers, and two of the most popular and influential Northwest bands, Suckapunch and Hungry Mob. He’s released an astounding number of albums, most recently the critically acclaimed “Thinking Out Loud,” and the newest, “Under the Sun.” Mic’s combination of strength that he can’t deny and sensitivity that he won’t deny has led him to collaboration both in music and in social action. He’s co-founder of Global fam (http://globalfam.org/), has worked as a social worker in Portland, and is currently engaged in helping the City plan and set up the very first all-music high school, to be opened in 2011.
Survival isn’t a given for anyone in America; if you’re a young black man, there are a hundred tracks leading straight to a coffin or oblivion. If you’re a young black man growing up in the city, you are challenged on every front-- physical, emotional and intellectual. Mic has taken the challenges, the combat and conflict, the driving rhythms of the urban environment that he mainlined in youth, and an integrity and faithfulness to the honesty of his own being in all its contradictions, and mixed them with the aim of finding and communicating a survival path for his people, who are all people. His rhythms compel. His rhymes put to lie the idea that poetry is dead. His music gets the blood pounding and the body, mind and spirit engaged
Barbara LaMorticella
Some Links:
www.myspace.com/mic crenshaw
Teach It
No prevention nor protection no contraception
In the event of divine intervention
And immaculate conception
The answer to the question of what is my profession
I’m that cat using rap as a weapon
Blastin smashing the elaborate deception
And casting an accurate reflection
I’m sculpting your perception
With cultural connections
Aggressively creative for spiritual reasons
Survival of my people liberation and freedom
That’s why I’m leading discussions on
Money, greed and corruption
The seduction of lust and destruction
And how we don’t need this to function
The people are the means of production
Sufferin and me we need no introduction
The global power structure needs adjustment
Just as much as my seed needs love
And peace won’t see the light of day without justice
Why the f**k you think I'm bustin raps?
I'm not a lush pushin a plush luxury bus
Full of sluts and cushions in back
Not that’s not the facts
Hook: It’s your language, use it speak it
Communication is a gift don’t keep it a secret
Articulation tweak it freak it
Let the people see it say it display it teach it
Transparency is needed apparently we need to have clarity
To see through the barbarity and evil used to deceive you
A message to the people don’t let em keep you asleep fool
I give a descriptive description of the resistance and friction
Persistence through all of existences
Struggles predicaments and positions
Complete with compromise
Traumatized by disease and addiction
Still I rise to my feet
Fighting to be free and defeat opposition
Mic Crenshaw from album “Thinking Out Loud,”
2008