REVIEW | HUMANITY 4 PALESTINE PRESENT ‘FREEDOM SOUNDS’

What a line up for the ‘Human­ity For Palestine’ event ‘Free­dom Sounds’.  Firstly, salute to all the people involved for organ­ising such a power­ful event which raised money for mul­tiple organ­isa­tions work­ing to end the occu­pa­tion of Palestine. The line-up con­sisted of Dead Prez, Hav­oc, Lowkey and 47Soul. I mean that’s a fac­tion you’d put up against D Gen­er­a­tion X in the Atti­tude Era (Wrest­ling fans would get that ref­er­ence!) I have to shout out fam­ily too. It’s such a bless­ing to see I am Hip Hop fam­ily  Apex Zero film­ing, Nadia Otshudi tak­ing pho­tos, Dj Snuff on the decks and Mas law jump­ing on for a bit of hosting.

Dead Prez is one of the health­i­est driv­ing forces in Hip Hop that has ever exis­ted; Books, Mar­tial arts, Act­iv­ist engage­ment for revolu­tion, healthy liv­ing, respect­ing our beau­ti­ful queens, and so forth. They installed an embod­i­ment of pos­it­ive growth in our com­munity, an impact­ful swing back against oppres­sion and a nour­ish­ing take on well-being. Lowkey has an undy­ing voice for the voice­less cov­er­ing an extens­ive amount of con­tro­ver­sies with­in our com­munity and world-wide. As an act­ive advoc­ate for Palestini­an rights, he was a prom­in­ent head­liner on the night. His music along­side the mighty Dead Prez has giv­en a vast amount of gen­er­a­tions hope to stand up what is right.  Hav­oc along­side Big Noyd…Thats the sound of New York Baby ! Every time you spin Mobb Deep, you have just paid a tick­et to go to Queens New York, first class, cham­pagne class, no cry­ing babies on the plane and a lim­ousine wait­ing for you to take you to where no man is safe from! So with that intro­duc­tion to these acts, I was quite simply GASSED!

Right, this is the part where you hear about my even­ing and how it all came to fruition. I left my amaz­ing ful­filling job which bit by bit helps keep young people out of unhealthy beha­viours and provide a ves­sel for them to express them­selves cre­at­ively. I then pro­ceeded to Brix­ton to fight a place to neck down the closest pint avail­able. Instead I was giv­en a gen­er­ous single shot of Wrey Neph­ew soda water and lime whilst eat­ing a deli­cious meal at Picky Wops recom­men­ded by the Vegan food blog­ger Brix­ton Food Fiend. Unapo­lo­get­ic Plug…and no she’s not pay­ing me! We scur­ried (yes I used the word scur­ried!) to the The Elec­tric Brixton.

I had nev­er heard Elec­tro Arab­ic Dab­ke band 47 Soul before I walked in, how­ever through the magazine’s sup­port of them I had heard of them. Are they on my playl­ist now? Yes. Do I feel I’ve missed out over the years? Yes. Do I feel embar­rassed that I didn’t know who they are? No. That’s how you dis­cov­er new music people! Any­way after boun­cing to the elec­tron­ic soul­ful sounds of the crit­ic­ally acclaimed band, the crowd sud­denly broadened their screams when Lowkey jumped out on one of their tracks. Women flocked to the front in hopes for some eye con­tact, a hair sample or a whiff of his after­shave, I’m jok­ing but not really and also hat­ing. That was the first appear­ance of the broth­er and I have to say he nev­er seems to amaze me on how polar­ising he is went he steps on. Through­out the even­ing there were speeches from Nancy from Human­ity for Palestine, Huda from The Palestine Solid­ar­ity Cam­paign, an acapella from an emer­ging Palestini­an artist and a brief word from a broth­er speak­ing on behalf of Gren­fell United. The stor­ies, pas­sion and pain dis­played was a sting­ing remind­er as to why we were there and the com­munity we were fight­ing for, Justice!

I embraced a few oth­er heads through­out the night includ­ing man like Shocka, who was right­fully praised and shouted out by Lowkey for his essen­tial involve­ment in Hip Hop right now. I pro­ceeded to con­sume more liquid cour­age and placed myself front row to wit­ness the rest of the show.

Lowkey got an extra­vag­ant slow build­ing intro­duc­tion and jumped on wear­ing all black head first with hard hit­ting machine gun word play.  Lowkey has an excep­tion­al abil­ity to work the crowd. His vocals were abso­lutely crys­tal clear as there isn’t too much going on with his instru­ment­als espe­cially bass wise. Unfor­tu­nately Hav­oc and Dead Prez slightly suffered because of the sound issue in that space. The whole per­form­ance was soul food for the com­munity. It was lib­er­at­ing to scream out lyr­ics like “You may take my life, but you can’t take my soul, you can’t take my soul ‘ and ‘They’re call­ing me a Ter­ror­ist, like they don’t know who the ter­ror is, When they put it on me I tell them this, I’m all about peace and love’. Scream­ing those chor­uses were like war­ri­or chants sang togeth­er from all walks of life stand­ing against vari­ous demons that tor­ment us phys­ic­ally, emo­tion­ally and men­tally. Wheth­er or not Lowkey is at the top of your list of emcees that have attacked the alpha­bet, his track ‘Alpha­bet Assas­sin’ is still an impress­ive piece of work and you’re still in awe watch­ing it per­formed. I’ll Para­phrase on an inter­view I did 2 years ago with Samurai Chigudu, the asso­ci­ate pro­fess­or of Afric­an Polit­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford. He said that “when you come to a per­form­ance like Lowkey with flags of Palestine wav­ing, people wear­ing hijabs, brown folks, black folks, white folks, old folks, young folks, show­ing each oth­er love , that kind of eth­os only hap­pens at a Lowkey gig, Few oth­ers pull that off.” A per­tin­ent point to the aura that Lowkey brings to his per­form­ances. His final song was some­thing that brought me and so many to tears when I saw him per­form it at the Cor­on­et at Ele­phant and Castle ‘Ghosts of Gren­fell’. How­ever much they try to extin­guish the pas­sion to accom­plish some kind of justice for the hor­rif­ic tragedy in North Kens­ing­ton, West Lon­don, moments like this , poetry like this, music like this motiv­ates action, sup­plies clos­ure and strengthens the bond we have for one anoth­er. Lowkey’s sounds dis­persed into the back­ground after anoth­er cap­tiv­at­ing set and DJ Snuff worked the turntables.

This is where the vibe didn’t just switch gears, it switched cars! Hav­oc and Big Noyd took the stage with the absences of the late great Prodigy.

It was the first time for me exper­i­en­cing a set from any of the mem­bers of Mobb Deep and it abso­lutely didn’t dis­ap­point. It was good to see Mike from the Chip Shop role through on stage. He deserves all the love in the world from Hip Hop Icons provid­ing such a fant­ast­ic plat­form for emer­ging and estab­lished artists in the heart of Brix­ton. That also indic­ated that there could be a cheeky appear­ance by Mobb at his spot later that even­ing. You’ll soon find out if that was the case. By this point I was still front row dab­bing and spud­ding fam­ily on the cam­era crew and swinging my head try­ing to break my neck. Clas­sic­al sym­phon­ies of NYC infilt­rated the Elec­tric and nearly every bar was recited by the thou­sands in attend­ance. I love Dead Prez, but due to the absences of some of my favour­ite tracks on their set, Hav­oc, Big Noyd and DJ Les were my high­light of the even­ing music­ally. ‘Quiet Storm’, ‘Hell on Earth’, ‘Sur­viv­al of the Fit­test’ and ‘Shook Ones, Pt 2’ almost back to back solid­i­fied an explos­ive ram­page of bod­ies bump­ing into each other.

The finale, the piece de la res­ist­ance, the cur­tain closer, the oth­er syn­onyms that asso­ci­ates with those words stepped on stage. It should have been a Dwayne John­son moment on the mic like , “Finally Dead Prez has come back to Lon­don!”. I’ve been told it hasn’t been that long but last time I saw them was Kentish Town 02 For­um 2011ish where I bagged an amaz­ing T‑shirt that my mum acci­dent­ally gave to char­ity. (First world prob­lems) M1 and Stic­man dis­played their power­ful pres­ence with inter­vals of mono­logues through­out their set. One in par­tic­u­lar I remem­ber was how power­ful our voices really are and when we speak, we should speak with power. The duo have always been a key mor­al force to carry my words with pur­pose. This is a remind­er that no mat­ter how much of someone’s dis­co­graphy you may know by heart, no mat­ter how many inter­views you may have encountered from artists you fol­low, there is always some­thing new you can take away from them or that gives you the same feel­ing from when you heard them the first time.

They wore tra­di­tion­al Dashi­kis as they have in so many occa­sions on the per­form­ance sup­port­ing Afric­an fash­ion around the world, and today stand­ing in solid­ar­ity with the people of Palestine. The B‑Boy remix to ‘Big­ger than Hip Hop’ was still dope enough to cause may­hem with swarm­ing bod­ies boun­cing into a per­spir­ing mosh pit. Also to add to the rep­res­ent­a­tion of all ele­ments of the Hip- Hop, they invited dance col­lect­ive ‘Rain Crew’ to the stage to rep­res­ent the B‑boys and B‑girls of the cul­ture, a pic­ture-per­fect Hip-Hop set­ting.   My favour­ite track on that night was ‘Police State’, the chor­us just tackled me bring­ing the dark side of some of our real­it­ies at the fore­front and how emo­tion­ally oppress­ive cir­cum­stances can be from the aggressors that be. They closed the night with the absence of anthems like, ‘They Schools’, ‘Ball or Fall’, ‘Mind Sex’, ‘Hap­pi­ness’, ‘Psy­cho­logy’, ‘Tal­l­a­hassee days’, ‘The Hood’ and a lot more that have moul­ded my Hip Hop spir­it. That’s my only dis­ap­point­ment with the com­plete under­stand­ing of time the con­straints that come when 3 legends take the stage in one evening.

The night con­cluded in the legendary Chip Shop BXTN. I rolled deep with the magazine, EOW and some oth­er beau­ti­ful human beings to a place that pulsates Hip Hop vibra­tions. We stepped in, toasted to life, the fight for free­dom and an excep­tion­al job well done. After I schooled every­one on the dance floor with my 5 moves of death, the beau­ti­ful Rishma still wouldn’t crown me as the best dan­cer in the group. That’s cool, Haters are every­where these days. Even if they’re amaz­ing people. One by one, euphor­ia car­ried dif­fer­ent people away into the night but I stayed. I knew what was com­ing after Hav­oc and Big Noyd stepped into the space. They went back to back in their sec­tion with vari­ous legendary tracks spin­ning in the back­ground until even­tu­ally, Hav­oc took the Mic. We were blessed with anoth­er legendary intim­ate per­form­ance that only the Chip Shop could provide. As a respons­ible indi­vidu­al, at like 1am with work the next day, I called it a night. I shared some Carib­bean food with the very tal­en­ted I Am Hip Hop pho­to­graph­er Nadia Otshudi on the way home and cracked jokes with Mas Law on the night train.

Free­dom Sounds exem­pli­fied the power Hip-Hop has to uni­fy, edu­cate, empower and entertain.

Togeth­er that night we were the voice for the voice­less, the voice of res­ist­ance against cor­por­a­tions that profit from the occu­pa­tion, against the media that does not report the truth, we were the voice for Palestine. Hip Hop was alive, fight­ing for free­dom and stand­ing tall for the people of Palestine.

Pho­to­graphy by Nadia Otshudi

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SIRE

Emcee, Radio Host, Journ­al­ist and Hip Hop junkie unwill­ing to go to rehab! Lon­don is my home and if there is a live per­form­ance cham­pi­on­ing the Hip Hop cul­ture, you’ll hear from me on what I think and you’ll prob­ably catch me there doing back­flips amongst Boom Bap sounds. Fol­low me on @reignofsire.

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