KRS One and Stop the Violence in New Orleans

KRS One visits a "camp site" in New Orleans as part of Stop the Violence's campaign to get the Hip Hop community involved in addressing global violence through education, critical dialogue, grassroots organizing and direct action. I've always had mixed feelings about KRS One's activism similar to the ones we discussed in class about celebrity activism. However, this video is really telling of the complex issues in New Orleans where there's no one group of people to blame - rather a complex system of governmental failures, issues of poverty and gentrification, land use, and natural disaster response.



Seeing this video reminded me of TED talk that I've been reading about from Philip Zimbardo (known for theStandford prison experiment) about his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (here's a nice interview from Wired). When people are put under intense pressure to survive or do their jobs, there are horrific things they'll do. While the scene with KRS One handing out money is a smaller contained example, this isn't something people would do normally but they're put in position where they're broke, homeless, hopeless, living in a city with a blind government and there's a guy handing out 20 dollar bills. What would you do?

KRS One Lecture

The sound quality of this is awful, but KRS One makes some parallels that made me realize that hip hop acts as activist media. Around 5:23 he makes some good observations:

Documentary on hip hop's beginnings

I wanted to share this with whomever (Jackie?) is doing their paper on hip hop, because its a fascinating piece of media about Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, Malcolm McClaren, DJ Kool Herc, b-boy culture, and the South Bronx. The beginning is weird, but you'll get an idea of how different hip hop was in the early 80's and late 70's and how it served the south Bronx community.