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Duce Khan and Tsis K, the two best MCs who rap in Hmong, performed together live for the first time at Boom Bap Village 2009. 

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.

Here’s a short video I put together from Monday’s rally for Fong Lee. For more information, see the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Here’s a short review and concert preview I wrote for the Daily Planet on the Somali MC K’naan. It’s an early show, doors are at 6pm, with M.anfiest and Muja Messiah opening.

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.

That’s a “wordle” of this blog. After tying up some academic loose ends for a bit, there will be a lot more words to go into that cloud. I’ve started working on a documentary, still searching for a title, but focusing on immigrant, refugee, and diasporic hip-hop in the Twin Towns of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and its vanilla (yet with a slow infusion of chocolate) suburbs.

In the meantime, check out some things I’ve shot over the summer at YouTube, which will be updated with new things as I edit more and more footage. And get your own wordle.

This Friday will be the Championship Battle for the inaugural Twin Cities Battle League, put together by RoseUp Productions and held monthly at the Blue Nile as part of “Freakin Fridays.” The winners from the 5 previous preliminary rounds (Shelltow, Illab, Flow, EZRA, and Elijah) will compete with a mystery guest MC for the grand prize of $250. Aspiring contestants can also sign up for the next series of battles. Hosted by Twin Citeis hip-hop legend TruthMaze, throughout the night will also feature performances by Carnage, OSP, and Chantz, as well as DJ Drea and DJ All Purpose on the 1s and 2s. For more information and clips of previous battles check out www.myspace.com/twincitiesbattleleague.com.

Not many hip hop artists can claim to have a mayoral proclamation on their resume. But from now on, the 22nd of December will be known as “Heiruspecs Day” in St. Paul, dedicated to the live hip-hop band that celebrated its 10 year anniversary at the end of 2007 with a collection of new material, b-sides, and live rarities called 10 Years Strong.

After the release of A Tiger Dancing in 2004, but especially after a near-fatal van accident in December of 2005, the band decided to take a break from touring and making music together. Members have worked on different individual side projects, occasionally reuniting to perform around town, as well as recording some new material here and there for a planned fifth album, some of which can be heard on 10 Years Strong. It’s obvious that the break has helped rekindle the desire to make music as Heiruspecs, as the new material on the record is some of their strongest to date.

The album begins where Heiruspecs began, as Felix spits on the new “Some From None,” the album’s opener: “Voluntary lockdown/deep inside the studio at Central.” The two original members of the band, Felix (Christopher Wilbourn) and Sean “Twinkie Jiggles” McPherson met in Red Freeberg’s recording class at St. Paul Central High, and began the group soon after. (The name is derived from “haruspex,” a term for a Roman soothsayer who predicted the future by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals.) The rest of the song consists of Felix’s reflections about where they’ve come from, their trials, tribulations, and triumphs, all with a palpable excitement in his voice and as well as in the intense, driving drums of Peter Leggett and dVRG’s synths. After “Some From None,” the band sequences the album like a good mixtape, going through material from their two out-of-print, cassette-only releases, 1998’s Live From the Studio and Antidisestablishmetabolism (2000), as well as a variety of live shows and other recorded nuggets from the band’s decade of existence.

The superior musicianship of the band, honed through years of touring, is on full display. The flexibility and versatility of the live band offers the possibility of a moving beyond the boundaries of a verse-chorus-verse structure, with subtle shifts of feel dotting their musical landscapes. Beats are heavier, the synths and guitars often darker and more distorted, as on “War Drums.” On “I Know,” the album’s finale, Felix relates his travels across the country, from spending time in Miami with Guardians of Balance MC Master Mind, and what it means to come home, riding arpeggios of piano, an almost harpsichord-like synth, and Twinkie Jiggles’ wide-ranging, but always in-the-pocket bass lines. Felix’s flow is focused, almost chant-like, a nice foil to fellow MC Muad’dib, whose vocals run the gamut from rhyming to singing and everything in between. Both, however, bring a density of metaphor and allusion to their songs. Take for instance Muad’dib’s verse on one of the other new songs, “Bright Lights,” with its churning organ, as he raps “if trees could be replaced with looseleaf/I would work words into the earth/to produce fruits of true speech.”

The youthful energy of their early work, evidenced by the prominence of battle raps of the first two records as well as the straight up funk and rock beats, has not diminished, only focused into thoughtful reflection—as Felix raps on “Some From None,” he’s “looking through a decade of hands in the air”—yet without navel-gazing. And such reflection on where Heiruspecs has come from does not translate, however, to nostalgia. This was clearly evident with the group’s pair of shows last December, the late set a 2-hour show that was easily one of the best of 2007, within and beyond hip-hop. With plans for another full-length in the future, if 10 Years Strong and their December concerts are any indication, there’s much look forward to.

Manifestations, the debut album from M.anifest, which stands for “Music-Always Needing Illumination For Every Soul Today,” seems destined to become a classic of Twin Cities hip-hop. The Ghanaian-born MC has already been named “Picked to Click” by the City Pages, and has received glowing reviews from most Twin Cities papers and a smattering of national websites. Along with Brother Ali, the buzz around him is the most for a Twin Cities hip-hop artist in recent memory.

The 25-year old MC, born in Accra, Ghana’s capital and largest city, came to the Twin Cities in 2001 to pursue an Economics degree at Macalester. Upon arriving, he decided to take a break from rapping, which he had been doing throughout high school with a group called The Rebel Camp. “We had no subversive content,” he told me,” we just thought ‘The Rebel Camp’ was a flash name.” He only began rapping once again in the last couple years, which makes his lyrical skills, memorably full of metaphor and allusion, all the more startling.

Ghana’s no stranger to hip-hop, with a wealth of artists, as well as its own distinctive hybridization of hip-hop and indigenous musical traditions, hip-life, and the tradition of speaking in a rhythmic style over musical rhythms and sounds can be traced back to long-held of traditions of West African griots. While M.anifest embraces where he comes from, it certainly does not exhaust his artistic identity, pigeonholing him as a gimmick. “If somebody picks up Manifestations and they couldn’t tell that this guy’s from Ghana, Africa, then I’m not representin’ truly what I’m doing.”

Yet while this forms the core of his identity, he recognizes and displays on Manifestations all of the different things globally circulating that have helped create him as a person living in and between different cultures. (This is visible in the liner notes, as well: he not only talks about how he recorded and mixed the album at “anywhere I’m at” studios, but also thanks his immigration lawyer.)

The completion of the album was funded in large part by a short jingle he did for Pepsi’s website, which is still online. “I sold out even before my album dropped!” he says jokingly, maintaining that this was a one-shot deal with Pepsi and that there’s no plans to work with them again. “I don’t even drink soda!”

While Manifestations is not just about clever rhymes, there are plenty of those, such as a line from the album opener “Spell Check,” how we wants to “spark the night like I’m Edison,” or on “eMcee PSA,” his challenge to the MCs of the world, how he’s “kind of like Braille/‘cause I know y’all are feeling me.”

M.anifest also lyrically invokes not only hip-hop history—give a listen to the title track for invocations for Poor Righteous Teachers, Kanye, and an offer to “Oblige you like Mary J.”—but also the history of African American musical culture. On the same song, he checks Miles and Kind of Blue, which have certainly been done before, but digs deeper to throw in Freddie Hubbard, a trumpeter not normally named on hip-hop records. On “Change Gon Come,” he seems to combine all this when he spits how he’s “traveled the globe with my African robes/from the Accra heat/to the Minnesota bitter cold” and flows “like Coltrane in the land of Purple Rain.”

In conjunction with M.anifest’s lyrics, however, the record’s beats also attest to this multitude of musical cultures and ideas that circulating and influencing his work. For the album, he amassed the 4Shades Crew, consisting of himself and three producers, GMOBeatz (a 15-year old beatsmith from St. Paul who has the most songs on the album), O-D (hailing from Milwaukee by way of the Seychelles), and Katra_Quey (also from St. Paul, but by way of New Orleans, and the producer of the title track from Desdamona’s The Source). There are also three Ghanaian producers, Coptic (based now in Brooklyn), Dee, and M.A.

A booming reggae beat undergirds “Babylon Breakdown,” samples of the Bar-Kays’ performance at Wattstax (also sampled by Public Enemy) dot the album’s musical landscape, spirituals on “Swing Low,” and Ghanaian drumming patterns all contribute to the feeling of Pan-Africanist politics, as well as world-traveling on Manifestations. More than any other, however, Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti is the inspiration for M.anifest. “Fela’s the innovator, he went full circle. He started doing highlife, then he created something new out of it. He traveled but he kept to his Africanness.” M.anifest creatively pays tribute to Fela throughout the album by dropping into Fela’s characteristic pidgin English, but most explicitly on “Gentleman, ” adopting and melodically imitating the refrain from Fela’s 1973 song of the same name (I no be Gentleman at all, no/I be Africa man original).

In a time where African artists are achieving much more widespread success than the standard “world music” record bin, folks like Akon, K’naan, and, soon, Emmanuel Jal are bypassing the stereotypical “world music” characteristics, firmly entrenched in hip-hop, rather than the often exoticised fantasies of diversity and hybridity. M.anifest’s breathless motto, heard throughout Manifestations is “represent Africa with a spectacular street vernacular,” and the MC breathes, speaks, and lives all that this statement entails. Watch for much more from M.anifest in the future.