M-1: New Year Revolution
When Dead Prez came on the scene in 1997 they brought a political awareness to hip hop, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Public Enemy. Speaking on subjects such as oppression, racial inequality and the conditions of inner city neighborhoods, they were determined to educate people while fighting the system. In addition to making music with a message, member M-1 is also a spokesperson for his “The Grassroots Artist Movement” organization. They work to not only bring awareness of the industry, but also have been providing free health care for artists for the past eight months. And as he gets set to release his debut solo project, Confidential, M-1 sits down to talk about the politics of the business, shedding labels and pimping the system.
Tell me about this solo project that you have coming out.
It’s my first solo album, it’s called Confidential, and the whole angle around it is the fact that there’s this world that’s been created around the secrecy and privacy of what human beings are doing. Some of us they call radical, but the reality is that we all have the potential to take the power and control over our own lives. Confidential is a look in, from the outside, almost from like an FBI point of view, at the life of someone like me. At the bottom of it all, you find it’s just a regular human being. But we are the ones who are being spied on and whose rights are being taken away. It boils down to a political statement about what is so secret and why the government moves the way it does.
It’s crazy because these FBI files really do exist.
There’s a book called, Black Americans: The FBI Files [By: Kenneth O’Reilly.] Everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Paul Robeson to Malcolm X to Langston Hughes has an FBI file that’s deep. As deep as: who they’re having sex with, what they said at a public rally, what they ate for dinner…things that you wouldn’t even think that you would know. I learned more about these people by looking at the FBI files than I did through their autobiographies. So I thought [the concept] is a great way to get to know M-1 through those eyes and particularly for those who didn’t know that this is happening – it’s happening to you, not just me.
How do you feel about the current political climate in this country, as well as the world?
M-1 is an international person, a man without borders. The physical borders that bind people I think have a lot to do with the politics that restrict us. What’s going on in the world has everything to do with what’s going on elsewhere. The US is in a very unstable place: economically, socially and in the government. There’s crisis all over. But it’s the illusion that everything is o.k. And I can tell you this because I visit Europe, South America – outside these borders all the time. I know the perception and I also know the value of the dollar. What’s going on inside America is a fight for the truth, the fight for information. And I think ultimately it’s a diversion. If we really pay attention to what’s happening, not only with the leadership of this country, but why people aren’t moving in a different way, then you’ll see an emergency - a red alert. But people aren’t in red alert mode… It didn’t take Hurricane Katrina for me to say that George Bush don’t like black people. Or for a lot of people it didn’t, for that matter. But I’m glad that the hurricane has been able to open a lot of people’s eyes. I knew that there would be a crisis like that and that we would have to deal with it. That is the state of America, and the state of our community. I’m not a quote-unquote activist. I don’t go door to door with leaflets; I don’t hold rallies or meetings. I do show up at them from time to time, and I support those programs. And I damn sure fight for my rights. But I kind of participate from this place – the place of an artist who recognizes that our culture is a weapon.
Being labeled a “conscious artist” in a lot of ways seems like a double-edged sword. Interviewing Common, he was saying how a lot people don’t give any leeway to those artists because there’s this bar that has been raised where you can’t even be human anymore. How do you feel about that?
The pressure comes if you’re trying to be that. And I never have been trying to be that. I’ve only been trying to reach the goals and objectives that I think are important to my community and my people. I think people easily do things like labeling just for stereotypes. If I did call myself a revolutionary…I have sex, I smoke weed, I drink beer and alcohol, I love to have fun and be on a Caribbean Island more than I like to be in my hood. Talking to people like Assata Shakur, who is exiled in Cuba, she calls herself a reluctant revolutionary. Because we don’t really want to do this. None of us want the drama. It’s just what has to happen. I want to live better – I have to live better. So the whole idea of being conscious – I fight the idea, I fight the label all the time. It puts this box around us. Most people say Martin Luther King was conscious. He was. Martin Luther King drank, had orgies with women…I’m saying that we’re real people. And as quiet as it’s kept, I’m not any more revolutionary than you are. Sometimes people prove me wrong. Sometimes people say and do things that I believe are against their own good. And I think it’s because they’ve been bought. Kind of like what 50 Cent said in GQ magazine about his admiration for George Bush, who I know is a terrorist and a criminal. With that being said, I like 50 Cent, but I think that was the stupidest thing he ever said in his entire life. Most people don’t understand that we’re under the gun and we don’t want to be that way. Now, what we’re willing to do and what statements we’re willing to make, is different. Some, like Master P, will make it seem like it’s all good, but will donate a million dollars to a great cause or put up a community center. It lets me know that he has a heart beat. You don’t have to be wearing the revolution on your sleeve. My album lets you see me as a whole person, whereas maybe with Dead Prez, you assume that we’re these strict ass vegans that don’t even have sex. I go through that all the time, from city to city. I’ve had internet articles written about that, just because it’s some sort of contradiction for me to love women. And I don’t take advantage of them…but because I enjoy women, I’m some sort of hypocrite? That’s crazy.
How do you feel about the state of hip hop these days?
There’s two sides, it’s always been that way. Music belongs to the people that make it and the people who want to hear it. The problem is that there are people who want to make money from it. And they stand in the way of both of these people. Our music is a reflection of our political maturity, no matter what you say. I don’t give a fuck if it’s “Laffy Taffy” or “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” it’s still a reflection of what we are thinking, who we are and what we’re gonna practice. I’ll take that home to my daughter and raise her correctly – that’s not a problem. The problem is the exploitation in the music. When we aren’t able to dictate what we really wanna hear and what we don’t want to hear. We’re bombarded with it through these propaganda and promotional mechanisms on TV and radio, and we really start to not think for ourselves. And there in you have the problem with the state of hip hop music. Some people would do anything to get into that position, and I think that level of prostitution is criminal. And it’ll keep going till we stop it…literally companies are paying artists to sell products through hip hop music. That’s what it’s become. And here we are, we love ‘em. These are our favorite songs. They have videos, and they get Grammy’s for this. And I think that’s criminal…Pop-Tarts, Playtex – you can’t get nothing without having hip hop attached to it.
People think it’s so cool being in the music industry, and would do anything to get involved in it. What do you tell these kids that want to get “put on” so badly?
Don’t get used! They use you for your energy; suck you dry for your ideas and then 10 years later you’re just figuring it out. You come out the other side, dizzy, trying to find your bearings – and you’ve been had. You’ve been bamboozled. So you have to use the system. The correct words are: Pimp the system…Trying to get into this industry, get next to these people who ain’t worth getting next to. Personalities are less than admirable who do things that you wouldn’t even want to do, or be associated with…Look at Puffy and The Lox. I was listening to Hot 97, and the guys were arguing about their contract. They’ve been away from Puffy for 11 years but he owns their publishing, they can’t even do an album – they’re retiring as The Lox. My point being, this guy Puffy sits back, and he’s created the most oppressive kind of contract in the world, where grown men can’t even do their own work and have a career. He has his foot on the neck of these artists, who a lot of people admire, but have no idea how exploitive this man is being over them…even his man Biggie Smalls, he owns his publishing too. What kind of person is this – and why do we love him? Do I want a friend who would do me like that? No. I don’t want anyone like that around me. But we revere Puffy for his business and his tenacity. That’s bullshit. It’s bullshit where he’s going, and what he’s done, and I don’t applaud it. True that those guys did sign a contract, and knew what they were signing. But those laws, of nature and the world, are not equal. Just ‘cause that contract said it’s fair, don’t mean it is. This is not fair - I don’t care if their names are on this line…he’s the bottom of the barrel, yet people love him and everybody wants to be that. I think that should be a lesson of what not to be. It’s crazy, and I don’t want my daughter to come up in that… Raising a daughter has brought a whole new perspective on life. It made me do things that I wouldn’t do. It made me do this record. I really had to just sit back and review what my life has been, and where I want it to be. I don’t want to be in this country in five to eight years.
Tell me about this solo project that you have coming out.
It’s my first solo album, it’s called Confidential, and the whole angle around it is the fact that there’s this world that’s been created around the secrecy and privacy of what human beings are doing. Some of us they call radical, but the reality is that we all have the potential to take the power and control over our own lives. Confidential is a look in, from the outside, almost from like an FBI point of view, at the life of someone like me. At the bottom of it all, you find it’s just a regular human being. But we are the ones who are being spied on and whose rights are being taken away. It boils down to a political statement about what is so secret and why the government moves the way it does.
It’s crazy because these FBI files really do exist.
There’s a book called, Black Americans: The FBI Files [By: Kenneth O’Reilly.] Everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Paul Robeson to Malcolm X to Langston Hughes has an FBI file that’s deep. As deep as: who they’re having sex with, what they said at a public rally, what they ate for dinner…things that you wouldn’t even think that you would know. I learned more about these people by looking at the FBI files than I did through their autobiographies. So I thought [the concept] is a great way to get to know M-1 through those eyes and particularly for those who didn’t know that this is happening – it’s happening to you, not just me.
How do you feel about the current political climate in this country, as well as the world?
M-1 is an international person, a man without borders. The physical borders that bind people I think have a lot to do with the politics that restrict us. What’s going on in the world has everything to do with what’s going on elsewhere. The US is in a very unstable place: economically, socially and in the government. There’s crisis all over. But it’s the illusion that everything is o.k. And I can tell you this because I visit Europe, South America – outside these borders all the time. I know the perception and I also know the value of the dollar. What’s going on inside America is a fight for the truth, the fight for information. And I think ultimately it’s a diversion. If we really pay attention to what’s happening, not only with the leadership of this country, but why people aren’t moving in a different way, then you’ll see an emergency - a red alert. But people aren’t in red alert mode… It didn’t take Hurricane Katrina for me to say that George Bush don’t like black people. Or for a lot of people it didn’t, for that matter. But I’m glad that the hurricane has been able to open a lot of people’s eyes. I knew that there would be a crisis like that and that we would have to deal with it. That is the state of America, and the state of our community. I’m not a quote-unquote activist. I don’t go door to door with leaflets; I don’t hold rallies or meetings. I do show up at them from time to time, and I support those programs. And I damn sure fight for my rights. But I kind of participate from this place – the place of an artist who recognizes that our culture is a weapon.
Being labeled a “conscious artist” in a lot of ways seems like a double-edged sword. Interviewing Common, he was saying how a lot people don’t give any leeway to those artists because there’s this bar that has been raised where you can’t even be human anymore. How do you feel about that?
The pressure comes if you’re trying to be that. And I never have been trying to be that. I’ve only been trying to reach the goals and objectives that I think are important to my community and my people. I think people easily do things like labeling just for stereotypes. If I did call myself a revolutionary…I have sex, I smoke weed, I drink beer and alcohol, I love to have fun and be on a Caribbean Island more than I like to be in my hood. Talking to people like Assata Shakur, who is exiled in Cuba, she calls herself a reluctant revolutionary. Because we don’t really want to do this. None of us want the drama. It’s just what has to happen. I want to live better – I have to live better. So the whole idea of being conscious – I fight the idea, I fight the label all the time. It puts this box around us. Most people say Martin Luther King was conscious. He was. Martin Luther King drank, had orgies with women…I’m saying that we’re real people. And as quiet as it’s kept, I’m not any more revolutionary than you are. Sometimes people prove me wrong. Sometimes people say and do things that I believe are against their own good. And I think it’s because they’ve been bought. Kind of like what 50 Cent said in GQ magazine about his admiration for George Bush, who I know is a terrorist and a criminal. With that being said, I like 50 Cent, but I think that was the stupidest thing he ever said in his entire life. Most people don’t understand that we’re under the gun and we don’t want to be that way. Now, what we’re willing to do and what statements we’re willing to make, is different. Some, like Master P, will make it seem like it’s all good, but will donate a million dollars to a great cause or put up a community center. It lets me know that he has a heart beat. You don’t have to be wearing the revolution on your sleeve. My album lets you see me as a whole person, whereas maybe with Dead Prez, you assume that we’re these strict ass vegans that don’t even have sex. I go through that all the time, from city to city. I’ve had internet articles written about that, just because it’s some sort of contradiction for me to love women. And I don’t take advantage of them…but because I enjoy women, I’m some sort of hypocrite? That’s crazy.
How do you feel about the state of hip hop these days?
There’s two sides, it’s always been that way. Music belongs to the people that make it and the people who want to hear it. The problem is that there are people who want to make money from it. And they stand in the way of both of these people. Our music is a reflection of our political maturity, no matter what you say. I don’t give a fuck if it’s “Laffy Taffy” or “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” it’s still a reflection of what we are thinking, who we are and what we’re gonna practice. I’ll take that home to my daughter and raise her correctly – that’s not a problem. The problem is the exploitation in the music. When we aren’t able to dictate what we really wanna hear and what we don’t want to hear. We’re bombarded with it through these propaganda and promotional mechanisms on TV and radio, and we really start to not think for ourselves. And there in you have the problem with the state of hip hop music. Some people would do anything to get into that position, and I think that level of prostitution is criminal. And it’ll keep going till we stop it…literally companies are paying artists to sell products through hip hop music. That’s what it’s become. And here we are, we love ‘em. These are our favorite songs. They have videos, and they get Grammy’s for this. And I think that’s criminal…Pop-Tarts, Playtex – you can’t get nothing without having hip hop attached to it.
People think it’s so cool being in the music industry, and would do anything to get involved in it. What do you tell these kids that want to get “put on” so badly?
Don’t get used! They use you for your energy; suck you dry for your ideas and then 10 years later you’re just figuring it out. You come out the other side, dizzy, trying to find your bearings – and you’ve been had. You’ve been bamboozled. So you have to use the system. The correct words are: Pimp the system…Trying to get into this industry, get next to these people who ain’t worth getting next to. Personalities are less than admirable who do things that you wouldn’t even want to do, or be associated with…Look at Puffy and The Lox. I was listening to Hot 97, and the guys were arguing about their contract. They’ve been away from Puffy for 11 years but he owns their publishing, they can’t even do an album – they’re retiring as The Lox. My point being, this guy Puffy sits back, and he’s created the most oppressive kind of contract in the world, where grown men can’t even do their own work and have a career. He has his foot on the neck of these artists, who a lot of people admire, but have no idea how exploitive this man is being over them…even his man Biggie Smalls, he owns his publishing too. What kind of person is this – and why do we love him? Do I want a friend who would do me like that? No. I don’t want anyone like that around me. But we revere Puffy for his business and his tenacity. That’s bullshit. It’s bullshit where he’s going, and what he’s done, and I don’t applaud it. True that those guys did sign a contract, and knew what they were signing. But those laws, of nature and the world, are not equal. Just ‘cause that contract said it’s fair, don’t mean it is. This is not fair - I don’t care if their names are on this line…he’s the bottom of the barrel, yet people love him and everybody wants to be that. I think that should be a lesson of what not to be. It’s crazy, and I don’t want my daughter to come up in that… Raising a daughter has brought a whole new perspective on life. It made me do things that I wouldn’t do. It made me do this record. I really had to just sit back and review what my life has been, and where I want it to be. I don’t want to be in this country in five to eight years.
