$3 Oscar Lopez Rivera

$3 issue # 2 • martin’s oppressors • yaz’ rebel flag • not4prophet’s anti-corporation nation • oscar’s Explaination of prison and art • vagabond’s hip-hop • luisa’s opinion • frank’s war for living space oscar lopez rivera issue # 2 table of discontents letter from an editor how whitey killed hip-hop understanding prison rebel flag or rican rag? my opinion the war for living space artist statement the oppressors anti-corporation nation collaborators Luisa Capetillo (1879 - 1922) letter from an editor Puerto Rican feminist, anarchist, labor organizer, and novelist. Frank Morales Pamphleteer and priest. Salvo says slam the shitstem. It wasn’t man-u-factured for you. not4prophet Don’t get it twisted. While that ball-and-chain bling draped around Voice of Ricanstruction. your favorite ghetto pseudostar’s neck may seem to suggest success, chains (no matter how expensive) still suck, and that double digit Martin Sostre debt your mama has amassed with her (slave)master card is a new Afro Rican writer, anarchist and former political prisoner. kind of shackle wrapped around all of our necks, until it finally sucks the life out of every one of us suckas. And that job you got at Corpo- Oscar Lopez Rivera rations R Us, along with all your brand new second-hand-me-down Artist and Prisoner of War. sear sucker starvation army suits, ain’t independence either, sister. vagabond Nor is the right to buy that big screen made-in-cambodia tv Artist, writer and filmmaker. on lay-away, or that stolen sweat shop stereo and I against Ipod, or the privilege of saving up for that colonial style home in some (once Yaz white) suburban soweto with guards at every gate to replace the Radical painter. guns in every ghetto that you once called casa. That rotting lottery is a lie too latino, and that torn ticket won’t even get you a one-way trip to La Perla or Pennsylvania. You ain’t what you own, especially if you don’t own your own. Salvo says don’t sell your soul to the highest (or lowest) bid- der, brother. Salvo says it’s never too late to smash the state. -Not4prophet edited by not4prophet and yaz layout and design by vagabond production by resister published by ricanstruction press to this. It would soon serve as the voice of that next generation that would come to realize how empty these promises were/are. Hip-Hop started after-hours, in parks that closed at dusk, with electricity from the streetlights powering turntables, microphones, speakers and mixers. The first MCs talked about how well they could rock a party or move a crowd and about the power they had with a Mic in their hand. DJs took the turntable, an apparatus used to play back music, and transformed it into an instrument to create music. Graffiti artists used New York Cities Mass Transit to create citywide mobile galleries to remind the system of their existence and to take art out of the galleries and put it in the street. Uprockers and B-boys expressed the constant state of ghetto warfare with over the top physical performance. It was a cultural statement created by Black and Puerto Rican youth living in the inner city ghettos of New York to convince ourselves that we were worth something. This was important because part of the master(s) plan in keeping these promises broken was to leave us feeling worthless. The roots of Hip Hop are in its bragging rights. Hip Hop created a sense of worth that illustration by vagabond the system was trying to destroy. Knowledge of self was at the root of Hip Hop and it was a cultural defense mechanism that created a how whitey killed hip-hop sense of self-esteem. Hip Hop is black music. It came from beneath the under- ground. It is the evolution of black music in the Americas. Hip Hop Hip Hop built the level of self-esteem so well that it became a was the natural continuation of Negro spirituals, Delta Blues, Be- lifestyle, a subculture. It became the culture of the B-boy and B-girl. Bop Jazz, R&B, Funk, Salsa, Reggae, and Rock and Roll (yes, Rock Participation was key because Hip Hop wasn’t spectator-driven. It is black music). It was a cultural backlash to the social and political was participatory. It was something you did. In order to be down, unrest felt by black and brown people in the inner-city ghettos. Hip you had to be versed in one of the four elements of Hip Hop. You Hop rose from the ashes of the civil rights movement and the black had to be a writer (graffiti), or an MC, or a DJ, or a Breaker. It was power struggle. The generations that came before Hip Hop made the only way to be down by law. It was the only way to be a B-boy huge strides in the struggle for freedom; the 60s and early 70s were or a B-girl. At its core Hip Hop, like Punk, was DIY (do it yourself) victorious times. The very air oppressed peoples breathed during and you had to be doing something or you just wasn’t a part of it. this period was charged with a wave of optimism and this created a Hip Hop became its own culture with its own language, its own fash- sense of worth and power for those who had always felt worthless ion, its own music, it own laws and values and moral. It went toe to and powerless. This was a movement that would not be stopped, toe with a system that wanted to destroy the self-esteem of a genera- so the only way to stem the rising tide of change was to exploit it. tion of black and brown inner-city youth. Hip Hop was the vehicle With this in mind, the capitalist white power structure found a way through which the culture of resistance would survive. to do so by making promises it never meant to keep. In doing so the system would appease those seeking change until it could find By the late 70s and early 80s Hip Hops popularity as lifestyle new ways to play the same old games. Hip-Hop became an answer grew among Black and Latino youth all across the country. Black and Latino youth who didn’t just feel left out by the larger white Ameri- a real threat to the white American power structure. Artists such as can society, but, in fact, knew that they were locked out by force. In N.W.A. with “Fuck tha Police” (and the FBI), and Public Enemy with America, poverty and racism and inadequate housing and police its militant stance on what it is to be too Black and too strong in brutality and prisons and mis-education were the preferred tools of America, were leading a new peoples army that would actually be oppression used to keep us from taking our forty acres. As a people perceived as a threat to the status quo. who had always been made to feel unwelcome and unwanted, the only alternative that was left was to create something that looked like Meanwhile, Rock n’ Roll, that once rebellious sound of the you, spoke like you, felt like you and sounded like you. Hip Hop 50s, is all but dead. The Baby Boomers that grew up on Rock and was a self-contained subculture that was in direct conflict with the Roll and the culture vultures that stole it from the black artists who larger white power structure in America. Back then, Hip Hop never created it, and cleaned it up for the mass (read White) consumption, looked for validation or acceptance within the white American cul- completely turn it over to the all mighty corporations and sell it out in ture because it knew that it would never get it. the name of fame, fortune and nostalgia. It’s used to sell cars and shampoo and toothpaste and the latest brand of sneakers. Even By the late “80s” and early “90s” Hip Hop began to be Punk, a genre created side by side with Hip Hop by a (mostly) White recognized as a serious musical art form. The social conscience and disenfranchised working class youth culture disillusioned by the radical nature of hip hop began to mature and suddenly became white-washed world their parents made, is de-clawed; it’s corporate co-opted artists now bloated caricatures of themselves who can’t see beyond their rock star status to attack the system they once claimed to abhor. And when Rock music and culture is finally and completely divested of its traditionally rebellious spirit and becomes just the last capitalist casualty, White youth in America become disheartened and search for something new that they can use to rebel without a cause. Something they can rely on to piss mommy and daddy off. Hip Hop becomes that something. And it works. The white power structure, which is essentially a tenuous and weak thing, fears Hip Hop will take away it sons and daughters, the future leader of this great nation. In an attempt to combat this dreaded cultural cancer, it rushes at Hip Hop head on, attacking it with charges of being a bad influence, and evilness, and nihilism, just as the system had attacked Rock and Roll back in the fifties and sixties. But this only made the situation worse. Or better. White kids began to consume Hip Hop in massive quantities, eating up every charge of deviance, every perceived act of rebellion.

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