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My belated review of M.anifest’s free mixtape, The Birds and the Beats, is live over at the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Watch this week for reviews of Lightning and Thunder, Vol. 2 and Analyrical’s First Date. Sorry I couldn’t write them before their respective release shows this past weekend, I was laid out cold by the flu.

Here are the spoken word performances from this month’s “Up in Arms” event, which took place at Macalaster College. The event was designed to raise awareness and funds for the family of Fong Lee, who was shot and killed by a Minneapolis Police Officer in 2007 and featured many, many of the Twin Cities’ best spoken word and hip-hop artists, as well as guest artists from across the nation. I’m editing the hip-hop performances and will hopefully have those up in the next week or so.

For more information on the Fong Lee case, see here, here, and here.

Here are some videos from the release show for Start A Fire, the debut EP from producer Big Cats! and MC/poet/activist El Guante. Sorry about the poor lighting, some of the Nomad’s lights were broken that night.

Building on the momentum from Illuminous 3’s debut album Room in December, FranzDiego.com recently dropped his own debut effort. With beats from Fire Like Water, PC, Noam the Drummer and Big Quarters brothers Medium Zach and Brandon All Day, the self-titled, 7-song EP is available for free download here.

Big upped for both his musical skills as well as community organizing efforts, especially as part of Yo! the Movement, both elements get expressed on Franz’s EP. Whether it be his shit-talkin’ and boastin’ on the laid-back opener, “Oh Geez,” spit over thumped upright bass and scratchy-record keyboards, or the more explicit political emphasis on the underrepresented in the Twin Cities (and Everywhere, USA, really) on “Old Man.” Throughout, of course, he’s always reppin’ the Southside (“my diction’s a depiction of wear I’m living at”) and you can almost see the thumb-and-index-finger “Southside” gesture thrown up to the music. But there’s also a number of thoughts on mixed-race kids, which Franz is proud to call himself, and the particular spot they hold in the Cities, something that’s not normally heard, here in the Cities or elsewhere. On the back end of “Who I Are,” he raps:

The Half Latino who spits raps to Gringos
and gets patronized as a token backwards people
I rep for my brethren
even though I don’t fit the description of a kid’s skin filled with melanin

In fact, the chorus of the radio-destined “Who I Are” (“Build, Build!”) might be a summation of the entire album, a short but packed expression of all the ways politics meets hip-hop, and how these intersections can be dope and enlightening and beneficial all at the same time, for those on the dance floor and the shop floor.