A Hip-Hop Week: Chapter 2 - How to Break Lines

So onto the next event that went down on Monday at the State Historical Society of all places. But I've gotten used to this space cause it has been used for the Linebreaks series that has taken over Madison recently. It was an 8 week series featuring some of the best spoken word artists, activists, historians, journalists, etc. from around the hip-hop community. This was a great set of events on its own and were were fortunate enough to tag this onto our events for the week.

http://www.arts.wisc.edu/artsinstitute/air/joseph/linebreaks.html

The artists that came this week were both from da Bay area. Rafael Casal and Dahlak Brathwaite





Both these dudes were amazing I have to say. They're not that much older than I am and at my age both of them were appearing on "Def Poetry Jam" and touring the nation. They both got up and did three pieces each and all of them were amazing, insightfull, spectacular, all the good things.

They got up afterwards to talk to everyone about how they use poetry and how they got their start. Both of them were involved in the Youthspeaks program and that is how they started with spoken word. This honestly has to be one of the most exciting 'after school programs' in the nation. It really is bringing kids some hope to do something and giving them a way to use their voices. I mean I have seen kids on stage that would appear to be the drop-outs and failures of society to most people, but they get up there and use thier voices to tell stories deeper than anything I have heard. Casal said it himself that he was one of the 'fuck-ups' and now look.

http://www.youthspeaks.org/indexx.html

For me I was able to take a lot away from this. Just in terms of my writing (or attempts) it just gave me more things to look into myself about. I mean for me, trying to write hip-hop anything, even being involved in the movement itself, being a white male from a privliged household in a good community, its hard to write about any type of 'struggle' as you would see it in the traditional hip-hopesque sense. But what made me think was about what struggles I can find in my life, my place, my city, in me. It takes more to dig and get down to it, but it is there and I feel that I might actually be starting to find it.

More to come...