Depending on your angle of observation, the notion of a hip-hop chain letter will seem self-evident, overdue, or redundant. Hip-hop is already a daisy-chain operation in which trunkloads of black Atlantic histories have been ferried back and forth and to and fro across space, time and minds, so some might ask “why literalize the process?” Yet precisely because movement has of late become so rare in this once most dynamic of contemporary art forms, this is absolutely the right time for a heavy hitting crew of underground movers and shakers to spur one another toward reflective action. Some of the artists are known to those of us who look left for our hip-hop futurism.
I met Charlie Dark, Mike Ladd, and Djinji Brown back in the early nineties when they were all up-and-coming poet/MC/producers and already becoming forces to be reckoned with. Dobie I met by chance once in London’s Camden Market a decade ago, and I subsequently came to respect the funk and intellect of his work on a friend’s project. King Britt has been racking up serious credits as a star DJ/remixer/scene-builder for years. That they could all find time to participate in this project says much about the casual and informal way hip-hop technology and ethos allow collaboration and friendship to flow – careering is the last consideration. The same attitude lives in the off-hand humor they drop into their virtual conversations with each other, especially in Mike Ladd’s case, and the concept’s fractured creative process itself.
What keeps the project from turning into a geek-tech boys’-night-out of engineering and sampling derring-do is the presence and prescience of its lone female artist, Netsayi. Zimbabwean by birth and now Bristol-based, she also functions as THE BLACK ATLANTIC PROJECT’s unabashed social conscience and, via guitar and kalimba, its clarifying, acoustic soul-bringer. She also drags the bloody Middle Passage into the room and ensures that those clanking chains resonate across the whole body of this digitized, disembodied message mechanism. In the process, Netsayi draws out the most obvious (if least visible) bit of thick connective tissue between black folk on the US and UK sides of the Atlantic, namely the trade in human cargo that created our rich diaspora of miseries and marvels.
Hip-hop was making the world smaller and more inclusive long before globalization and the Internet became the bywords of modern life alongside capitalism and state-sponsored terror. What hip-hop, and its genius stepchild Jean-Michel Basquiat, seemed to have figured out before the rest of us was that in the near future, any and all information, and especially black Atlantic information, would bundle itself into a beast in its own right. It would turn, right before our eyes, into an aggressive form of currency capable of shaking, rattling, and rolling whole empires, ancient and new world alike. What couldn’t be predicted, perhaps, was that the critical, outlaw status of hip-hop culture would, like Basquiat’s work, be swept up by the info-oligarchy, too. For this reason, a project such as THE BLACK ATLANTIC PROJECT is invaluable for the way it returns intimacy, playfulness, camaraderie, trans-Atlantic Afro-centric politics, and sardonic self-revelation to the contemporary hip-hop landscape.
Journalist Greg Tate's books include Fly Boy in the Buttermilk; Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience. He is a culture critic for The Village Voice and contributes regularly to national publications such as Rolling Stone, VIBE and The New York Times. In addition, he is a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition and leader of the critically-acclaimed band Burnt Sugar. He lives in New York City.
This article was first published in the International Edition of The Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, Summer 2006, and reproduced with the kind permission of the author.
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