Dead Prez takes it off the top

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Almost five years since the release of the last full dead prez album—2004’s Revolutionary But Gangsta, which introduced a new reverse-acronym for red-black-green and troubled some die-hards by starting with “Don’t Forget Where U Came From” and finishing with Jay-Z’s verse on the remix of “Hell Yeah.” Not sure what the applicable analogue is—Bruce Springsteen playing guitar on “Kick Out The Jams”? “We broke those boxes you all try to put us in, separate us—we together on the same track now!” said Jay-Z: tactical insight for a group who started self-declared between N.W.A. and P.E. but who still don’t attach easily to simple definitions. Review after review has them as either hard-ass warriors or hard-ass delusionals, depending on who exactly is writing and how they interpret a song about sticking up the pizza man when you’re starving or a matter-of-fact how-to for credit-card fraud—one writer even dared ask about the don’t-you-hate-white-people? thing. They do not, said M-1, who with partner prez stic.man (recent author of The Art of Emceeing, propagating technique and philosophy to unrefined ramblers) is working now on a new dead prez album scheduled for fall release. They hate the system, he explained, which benefits white people more than anyone else, and when they say black-power brown-power, they mean share the power. Build a new world in the new world, as another New York writer put it, who also put it this way: “Somebody’s got to be your teacher. And I’m it.”

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Tags: dead prez, hip hop, Long Beach, Music, the blue cafe