Earlham students sing with Mohammed Al Farra during Friday’s Art Is Our Resistance concert.

 

Rapper M-1 of Dead Prez wraps up the night of activist performance art.

Poets slammed, break dancers spun, rappers spat, and the crowd went wild at the hip-hop concert “Art is Our Resistance” on Friday, Nov. 13.

The four-hour event was sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs’ newly-formed Diversity Council and showcased ways in which hip-hop artists use their craft as a vehicle to resist oppression.

The event featured nine acts, ranging from the politically charged duo Dead Prez to break dancers from Chicago’s Southwest Youth Collaborative, a group that seeks positive ways to channel the energies of urban youth.

The night’s many performers hailed from such diverse locales as Chicago, New York, Puerto Rico and Palestine, and their performances reflected the political realities they perceived in those places.

“The question of liberation was one that all the artists … were addressing broadly, but from their particular locations,” explained Director of Multicultural Affairs Trayce Peterson.

Peterson said that the idea for the event was proposed to the Diversity Council by the co-convenors of Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine (SPJP), one of the many groups that compose the council.

Sophomore Leith Odeh, a co-convenor of SPJP, was heavily involved in the planning and organizing of the event. He hoped the event would be “a start for us to be able to do work together in the future … to recognize all the different struggles and connect them together, and basically just to understand them.”

In addition to SPJP, the event benefited from the participation of many other campus groups such as Black Student Union, Sociedad de Estudiantes Latinos and the Student Activities Board.

“It’s something new,” sophomore Julia Berner-Tobin, SPJP co-convenor, said of the event’s scope. “At least for the time I’ve been at Earlham I’ve never seen something like this be done.”

The concert was scheduled to begin at 10 p.m. in Comstock, but plane delays pushed back the starting time. When the doors finally opened at 11 p.m., members of the Earlham community had formed a line snaking past Runyan desk. 

Members of the involved campus organizations served as event staff, giving purple wristbands to ticket-holders and keeping an eye out for intoxicated guests.

Many in the crowd were unsure of what to expect from the evening. Some, such as senior Mica Whitney, had only heard of Dead Prez. “There’s a bunch of people I don’t know, so I’m excited to hear them,” Whitney said.

The performances began with poetry. King Keith and Ismail Khalidi, the first two poets of the night, expounded on oppression and resistance from an African-American and Palestinian perspective respectively.

 “This is addressed to you, America,” King Keith proclaimed, “so you never forget, so you always remember our faces.”

The third act, Puerto Rican poet Mayda del Valle, brought a distinctly feminist viewpoint. Her poetry also touched on her commercial success. “I may not be true to this ‘cause I get a paycheck for doing this,” she conceded. However, the audience’s hearty applause indicated that they accepted her as the real thing.

After the poets left the stage the audience opened a circle in their midst to allow the five break dancers from SWYC to show off their skills. The young men spun, balanced and leapt their way into the crowd’s favor, taking turns trying to out-perform each other. Not all was competition, however, as they also executed carefully choreographed dance moves and lifts that could have been borrowed from classical ballet.

The rappers took the stage after the dancers dispersed. G.O.D., of the Brooklyn-based hip-hop group Pitch Black, was less overtly political than the poets, although he did proclaim himself to be “from the streets.”

Shadia Mansour followed G.O.D., rapping and singing in Arabic. She declared hip-hop to be an alternative to violence as a form of resistance, saying “Every single soldier [Israelis] kill, they give birth to a new Palestinian hip-hop artist.”

In case one foreign language was not enough for the Earlham crowd, the trio Rebel Diaz took the stage next, rapping in both Spanish and English. Group member RodStarz confronted the audience, saying, “As college students you are people of privilege.” He admonished Earlham students to use this privilege in the service of people and not corporations.

Mohammed Al Farra, member of the seminal Arabic hip-hop group Palestinian Rapperz (PR), followed with his second Earlham performance, having performed here last spring.

By the time Al Farra ended his set at almost 3 a.m., the crowd had dwindled considerably. However, those who remained eagerly greeted the final act, Dead Prez. Their message was perhaps the most overtly political, demanding reparations for descendents of slaves and the release of all American prisoners. “Middle finger up for the police!” they shouted, and the mostly law-abiding crowd gladly complied.

Although the crowd reacted positively to all acts, not everyone was left completely satisfied. Senior Adam Estroff called the concert “frustratingly long.” He also wished he knew more about the political views of the Arabic-language rappers. 

“When somebody’s rapping about political things I want to know, like, what they’re saying,” he said. “I’m not gonna [raise] my fist to something that I don’t understand.”