You had me at “Kalashnikov”

Record Review: Immortal Technique, "Revolutionary Volume II"

It isn’t often that a song, let alone an entire album, has the power to make me listen to it from start to finish and then play it over again. This may be because I have really bad ADD, but then again, who doesn’t these days? As someone who acquires most of her music when it’s convenient, trading 20 gigs at a time with friends and acquaintances, I was uncharacteristically faced with a certain degree of imperative last month when I received a CD in the mail from a friend back east. “Listen to this – NOW” was the only note, scribbled on a Post-It, that accompanied the album. I don’t remember what I was doing at the time, because whatever it was faded away as soon as Mumia Abu Jamal’s voice came on to introduce the artist and the album: “You’re listening to Immortal Technique, and this is ‘Revolutionary Volume 2’, bringing you the Truth in the form of hip-hop.” For the next hour I sat completely still, floored by what I was hearing. Then, like a chain letter, I made 6 copies for friends and rushed to distribute Technique’s “Truth.”

The album is a revelation. Unlike any hip-hop I’ve ever heard, Technique rhymes from the head and the gut. Traversing the rocky, often cavernous American political landscape, his songs are precision-guided bunker-busters targeted at the lies of American leaders, ideologies, and institutions. In “The Point of No Return” – the first song of album – Technique plays upon the dual meaning of the title: his eyes have been opened to the political crises his country faces and he refuses to forget what he has seen. In the song’s hook he repeats, “From now on it can never be the same as before, ’cause the place that I’m from doesn’t exist anymore.” With this imagery of a gentrified, ghettoized urban America, he launches an attack on American capitalism, class warfare, and racism, which he is able to sustain – in rhyme – throughout the album. From the beginning of this first song we begin to understand the extent of Immortal Technique’s creative, political consciousness as Nat Turner, Elijah Muhammed, the Templar Knights, and Mary Magdalene join hands and encircle the pyre of his “murderous methodology,” while violins violently pump in apocalyptic accompaniment. Now, if that doesn’t interest you, maybe this will:

Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal.
This is the last time that I kneel and pray to the sky,
Because almost everything I was ever told was a lie.

Forget religion, anyone who has ever been to public school can identify with that, I think.

As this album played through, I stayed AWAKE and alert because this album lacks a cohesive thematic unity, and so each song must stand on its own, declaring itself as a new, unique flavor. From beneath the “Harlem Streets” runs a not a subway but a “multicultural slave ship” transporting workers home not from work, but from “corporate sharecropping.” Immortal Technique performed this song on Sunday night at the Fillmore in San Francisco without musical accompaniment and it was even better than on the album; it was poetry, poetry slammed unencumbered by the dictates of musical meter. In “4th Branch,” Condoleezza Rice morphs into Sally Hemings as Technique describes what isn’t being said by the corporate news media. In this song, more than any other on the album, poetry and message merge: Technique is angry, and he tells you that you should be angry too. Competing with this outrage at the world is the outrage he seeks to inspire in his audience. After the bacchanalian romp of “Obnoxious” – in which he takes aim at everyone from Cuban Americans to fellow rappers to members of Alcoholics Anonymous – if he hasn’t pissed you off yet, you haven’t been listening.

“Peruvian Cocaine” is this album’s epicenter, and it shook me. Immortal Technique lifts both the beat and the song’s introduction from the 1983 remake of Scarface, and in this story of the political implications of the drug trade we are introduced to a cast of characters at various stages from the production to the consumption of, you guessed it, Peruvian cocaine. The song becomes a tragicomic performance starring Immortal Technique, Crayz Walz, Pumpkinhead, Loucipher, Tonedef, Diabolic, and Poison Pen, in which we follow the drug as it moves from the peasant forced to cultivate it as coca (done brilliantly by Technique in a mix of Spanish and English) to the paranoid consumer of crack confined in an American prison. Reminiscent of historian Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, in which the cultivation of sugar by slaves in the Caribbean is paralleled with its consumption by near-starving factory workers in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, this song does Latin American agricultural commodity economics better than most academics.

So why is it, then, that when I shared this album with my friends I received such a mixed response? Those who weren’t blown away were appalled that I would dare to give them this album, as though I’d engaged in some egregious assault on their consciences. Well, it seems that some people are offended by the word “nigger.” While I don’t want to dump on the outrage this word inspires – because its use should offend people – I think it is important to understand why this word is frequently used in hip-hop. While some rap is blatantly and unapologetically racist, Immortal Technique and other underground artists have seized and retrofitted this racial epithet in such a way that it could be substituted with “comrade” and retain the same meaning. Before you reject this interpretation, let me note that I contacted Technique’s publicist yesterday, inquiring about the reasons for the artist’s use of the word “nigger” in almost every one of his songs. Technique himself responded: “On the East Coast when Hip Hop started the word was used to express comradery between people in the Black and Brown community. It is not said…with the purpose of disrespecting.” He then followed up with a comment about Berkeley, which, though I find somewhat fair, I’m not going to repeat. The use of this word by an Afro-Latino artist in this context is excusable, especially when he uses his craft to take aim at Christian and Muslim racism…oh, and “racist motherfuckers” like Bill O’Reilly.

This doesn’t mean, however, that this is a politically flawless album. At his concert on Sunday, Immortal Technique told his audience: “You can either be a rock star or a revolutionary,” implying that he has opted out of being a “rock star” because he has shunned the corporate music establishment in favor of revolutionary principles. Besides the fact that I think calling yourself a revolutionary is like calling yourself a genius – i.e. it is something best left for others to say about you – I myself have a problem with this self-described “revolutionary” hip-hop because there is nothing revolutionary about homophobia. And homophobia, it seems, is ubiquitous among both revolutionaries and rock stars. Consider this, from “Obnoxious”:

Nigga’s trying to be hardcore, you fucking homo thug!/ And don’t be sensitive and angry at the shit that I wrote,/ ’cause if you can take a fucking dick, you can take a joke….

Now, compare Technique’s justification of his homophobia with Eminem’s “White America”:

So now I'm catchin’ the flack from these activists when they raggin’/ Actin’ like I'm the first rapper to smack a bitch or say faggot, shit!

At least Ann Coulter recognizes she shouldn’t use the word “faggot” before she does.

All this lyrical homophobia leaves me a little confused about what “revolutionary” really means to Immortal Technique. It seems that if he wanted to really be revolutionary he would shun homophobia, right? To be revolutionary can mean two, not necessarily mutually exclusive things: it can mean doing something that has never been done before, which I think applies to much of Technique’s work. Or, a revolutionary can be someone who wants to overthrow the current, established power structures in their society and institute their own – think Fidel Castro, who suppressed homosexuality in Cuba and imprisoned those who refused to do the same. So, if Immortal Technique aims to do both, to change the face of hip-hop and overthrow the political regime in the United States, I don’t think I can get behind him with his current values. But if he wants to change the way that hip-hop functions, and what the majority of hip-hop communicates, he has my raised fist. So, to come out and say homosexuality isn't something he actually despises, and that it is one of the things that Americans focus on bashing, protesting, vilifying...rapping about...because we don’t want to actually confront our terminally ill democracy, would be taking a revolutionary stand in hip-hop culture.

Of course, to this Technique has already prepared a retort: “How dare you niggers criticize the way that I spit/ You coffee shop revolutionary son-of-a-bitch.” But listen, Tech, don’t get mad about this, all I’m saying is that you need to take that extra step, and I know you’re afraid, but I got your back. I’m really in love with how you do what you do, all I’m saying is that what you say reflects upon what you do, and if you are really a revolutionary then you need to act like a REVOLUTIONARY and confront hip-hop and our society by changing the terms of American political discourse.

Still, all the political implications of these words aside, Immortal Technique’s poetry is eloquent if not earth shattering, and set to music it takes on a life of its own. It becomes ART, and for this reason “Revolutionary, Volume 2” is going on my bookshelf, not my hard drive, because any man who rhymes “Holocaust” with “Kalashnikov” has won my heart.