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Also this issue: Pigface Sweet Relief Launch Party |
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March 20-26, 2003
mixpicks
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As the war in Iraq looms large, hip-hop's been returning to the days of fightin' the power and becoming increasingly politicized. That's all gravy but the almighty rappin' buck definitely stops there. What about women and gays? From DMX to Common to Eminem, it's still common practice to bash these groups with abandon. Enter the "Shook Ones" panel, organized by University of Pennsylvania's QPenn and hosting a stellar troupe of rabble-rousers and thought-provokers: Keith Boykin, Ingrid Rivera, Caushun and Michael Eric Dyson. Moderator extraordinaire, Harvard hip-hop archive media consultant and Penn doctoral candidate James Peterson will try to keep the pace. One of the nation's leading mouthpieces on race and sexual orientation, Keith Boykin has seemingly done it all -- from a teaching gig at American University to serving as special assistant to President Clinton -- between graduating from Harvard Law School and writing several award-winning books. Ingrid Rivera (pictured), the Brooklyn-born black Boricua community organizer, poet and performance artist, has stunned crowds at the Nuyorican Poet's Café, reaped a ton of awards and is currently fronting her one-woman show, Lagrimas de Cocodrilo (Crocodile Tears). Caushun shook up the industry when he came out to the hip-hop community, dropped his debut album and coined himself "The Gay Rapper." To declare homosexuality as a hip-hop artist is akin to doing so in professional sports; it almost never happens. And topping off the panel there's the controversial Professor Dyson, author of Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (BasicCivitas Books), and the latest big thing to hit Philly. This forum is serious business; it's high time the male-dominated machismo-machine we call hip-hop is taken to task.
Shook Ones: A Panel on Homophobia in Hip-Hop, Sun., March 23, 5-7 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., 215-573-3234, www.foundationarts.org.
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