Tag: rap

MAR 30, 2012 - The shooting death of Trayvon Martin was painful for Seattle-based musician Okanomode, and he could relate to the profiling that probably played a role in the death of Trayvon and tells JTMP, “I myself am a young black gay male growing up in America & know first hand what it's like to live in fear of attack by police or others who might fear me simply on the basis of both my blackness &  my gender expression, & i feel more than ever that community is so necessary in these painful times.” He was so moved by the event he composed "Song For Trayvon", check it out below.

MAR 26, 2012 - Activist rapper musician Jasiri X, whom JTMP has blogged about when posting about Occupy Wall Street, has wrote and put out a music video titled, "A Song for Trayvon" in honor of Trayvon Martin, the young man shot and killed in Florida last month. Check out the performance at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, New York in a video below. To sign a petition calling for justice for Trayvon, visit MoveOn.org, and also you can text "Trayvon" to 30644. The hashtag is #SongForTrayvon.

Jan 12, 2012 - Libyan activist musicians, who go by the name GAB Crew, have been putting out activist music supporting the youth uprising and the Arab Spring in Libya from the start. They wrote a song called "Libya Bleeds Just Like Us" while Qaddfi was still in power, and months before Tripoli fell. The song was leaked, and when asked by a Qaddai loyalist to write a pro-Qaddafi song, they were horrified and went underground. When the rebel force took the capital, they returned home, and are happy now that they can be more free to be creative and express themselves with protest songs under the new transitional government.

Read more in a NY Times article here, and check out GAB Crew's "Libyan Bleeds Just Like Us" music video below.

OCT 27, 2011 - New York hip-hop artist MK-Ultra Emcee emailed JTMP with his activist protest music video called "Who's The Man", and after watching it we thought we should post it and have everyone check it out. He said he wants to show the many faces of the Occupy movement, and rapper Jasiri X whom JTMP posted about the other day makes an appearance in the video. MK-Ultra says on his Facebook page, "MK-ULTRA is a politically conscious and controversial emcee from New York City introducing a new strain of revolutionary Hip-Hop." Check out the music video below.

OCT 25, 2011 - Rapper Jasiri X wrote a great activist song called "Occupy (We the 99)" and put together a video showing that he supports the Occupy movement. Some of the lines from the song are:

"And nobody got more welfare than Wall Street/Hundreds of billions after operatin' falsely/and nobody went to prison/that's where you lost me/but my home, my job and my life is what it cost me."