By Maxim Tamarov, news editor
Talib Kweli, influential rapper and social activist, spoke at Berklee College of Music on Monday for the eighth annual Business of Hip-Hop and Urban Music Symposium.
Kweli, who made a name for himself rapping alongside Mos Def in the group Black Star and collaborating with artist Hi-Tek, elaborated on his life and rap career, his experiences in the music business and the responsibility of hip-hop fans to urge their favorite artists to produce meaningful music and participate in social activism.
“As fans, you need to be more demanding of your artists,” Kweli said. “If you’re not hearing hip-hop you want to hear, you need to switch circles.”
Kweli pointed out that record industries put out music that people show the most interest in. As long as the majority is inclined to hear meaningless music, it will be produced and marketed, while deep, soul-wrenching hip-hop artists sink into anonymity.
“Those entities started marketing to the lowest common denominator,” Kweli said. He also made sure to defend artists such as 2 Chainz and Trinidad James for their club-hit music, which is deliberately not serious.
“I was incredibly impressed but not surprised by his responses,” Jake Gillman, a junior music industry major at Northeastern, said. “As an artist, as a rapper and producer myself, hearing him talk about the business and how he came up, how it’s changed—it really puts it in perspective.”
Kweli made headlines recently for his confrontation with CNN reporter Don Lemmon in Ferguson, Mo. While interviewing Kweli, Lemmon made repeated attempts to interrupt the rapper and Kweli said he felt disrespected by this. His retort was that Lemmon would not have interrupted him had he known him to be a significant social presence. Kweli also explained that his presence in Ferguson was motivated by his belief in movements on the ground, and that simply using Twitter to advocate issues is not enough.
“I think the way he touched on social questions that he answered were all very eloquently put,” Gillman said.
He defended Kweli’s heated reaction to Lemmon in Ferguson, and pointed out the calm precision with which Kweli elaborated on the issue this time.
In July, Kweli made a well-publicized decision to cancel his show in Tel Aviv to signify solidarity with the Palestinian boycott. He defended his decision on Twitter, conducting debates on the issue with those who opposed his choice not to play in Israel. Kweli said that he wanted to play in both Palestine and Israel originally, but because of the Palestinians within Israel who were unable to come to his show, he cancelled plans to go.
In explaining this hot-button issue, Kweli acknowledged respect for Israel’s liberal stance on LGBTQ rights and women’s rights in comparison to many of the countries in the region. However, he did not want to support Israeli use of such issues as a distraction from what he believed was an apartheid in the land of Palestine.
Kweli is not alone in his egalitarian efforts. Rappers have been making music to incite public reform for decades. The Berklee symposium team included Kweli for that reason in particular.
“This year is special to us because we’re focusing on social impact and social justice in hip-hop,” Darcie Nicole, co-producer of the event, said.
Nicole reminded the audience that social impact is central to the music style.
“This initially was a liberation movement,” she said.
Don Gorder, chair of music business and management at Berklee, agreed.
“This is an event where we can really reach out to the hip-hop community,” Gorder said. “It heightens an awareness of the importance of this music.”
When Kweli was in high school, he struggled to come up with a rap name. At the time, there were very few artists in the genre who went by their real names. Kweli said that he was trying to pick a meaningful rap name and could not think of a name smarter than his given name. Talib was the uncle of the Muslim prophet Muhamed, whose name means student. Kweli is a product of his Ghanaian heritage. It means truth. The struggle to find his name mirrored the social struggles Kweli felt as a boarding school student.
“There was a lot of tension between the boarder school kids and the townies. And then a lot of tension between the white kids and me,” Kweli said of the contrast between living in Brooklyn and going to Cheshire Academy in Connecticut. “If you make yourself indispensable to the situation—if you make your presence imperative—then the rules of society don’t necessarily apply to you.”
It was a lesson he learned at the boarding school where he was one of few African Americans. It was also a maxim evident in all his future endeavors.
Kweli’s parents were both professors, and his brother would grow up to be a professor as well. Kweli also mentioned that had he not gone into a career in hip-hop, his likely seconds were professorship and maintaining the bookstore, Nkiru, the first black bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y. Kweli was a former employee of the store and when its original owner passed away, he purchased the store with Mos Def.
“If you wrote a book and you were black, you came to Nkiru,” Kweli said of the venture. He listed a large number of artists and writers — such as Johnnie Cochran, Octavia Butler and Maya Angelou — that he was able to interact with due to his employment and later co-ownership of the store.
While in boarding school, Kweli used his pull as a proctor to skip study hall and had his friends sign in for him and stuff his bed with pillows, so that he could sneak out and take trips down to New Haven, Conn. Ice Cube was playing at the small but significant club, Toad’s Place (Toad’s). He later commemorated the experience in a lyric in his song “Rare Portraits” off his new album, “Gravitas.”
“That Ice Cube show was very important to me… At that time, Ice Cube was smothering … I had never been to a concert like that in my life, so I was the first one there,” Kweli said.
Kweli reminisced about the show, saying that Toad’s felt so much larger than it was back then — larger than life to Kweli. He was just discovering the art he would later hone while listening to a rapper whose gangster rap music was infused with street knowledge, a staple of Ice Cube’s work. Del the Funky Homosapien was an opener, back then known as Ice Cube’s weird cousin. Kweli admired and strived to reach such a sound before he found his own.
When he arrived to college at New York University, he studied theater but expressed no interest in pursuing it as a career. Instead, he and his roommate, fellow musician John Forté, would skip classes to focus on developing their musical talents.
“He knew a lot more about the music industry than I did at the time,” Kweli said. “He was already working with the Fugees. He went to school for about a week and then he just stopped going to classes and was doing music for a living. I thought I had the room to myself and he would just show up whenever—sometimes at the wrong time. He was being John Forté. He would just show up at three in the morning, unannounced. We didn’t have iPhones. There was no Twitter.”
Twitter now seems to be his preferred platform for spreading his messages. As his audience expanded, Kweli began reaching out to fans with social media.
“Twitter I took to like a fish to water,” Kweli said, “because I think like that anyway — in 140 character bursts.”
Photo courtesy Lee Delulio
