Thursday, March 8, 2018

Save the date: Respect Hip Hop Exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, March 24-August 12, 2018



 

Bay Area folks, don't miss the Respect Hip Hop Exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, March 24-August 12, 2018. As per the Black Arts Movement as the foundation of Hip Hop, the archives of Marvin X and the Black Arts Movement will be displayed. FYI, the Museum is planning a permanent exhibit of the Black Power Movement, including the Black Arts Movement. The museum is discussing a partnership with Oakland's Black Arts Movement Business District, CDC, of which the museum is a venue in the district and a permanent exhibit of Oakland's Black radical political,cultural and economic history is vital to uplift those stuck in the low information vibration, says Marvin X. As a BAM/BAMBD co-founder, Marvin has begun meetings with the Oakland Museum to make the Black Power Exhibit a reality and homage to all those freedom fighters who gave selflessly their sweat, blood and tears. Marvin X says, "Oakland is one of the most radical cities in America, similar to Fallujah, Iraq, a city of resistance that was decimated by US forces. Oakland suffered the same decimation vie Cointelpro, Army, Navy, Marines, National Guard, local police, agent provocateurs and snitches. There were snitches who told of planned rebellions and simply reported on the Black Mood.   

".....Marvin X is a teacher of primeval knowledge, a knower of both street poetry and book poetry. In fact, he combines the two in a powerful way. Each verse is a teach act, each stanza--a class. His use of alliteration, rhymes, assonance, dissonance and free rhymes indicates he has absorbed the teachings of the academy. Yet, the street consciousness lying in the cut of its content links him directly to the poets of the new idiom called Rap." Of course critic James G. Spady placed Marvin X at the very foundation of Rap, whether conscious or unconscious, "When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express black male urban experiences in a lyrical way!"--James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer Newspaper

Marvin X says, "Of all the rappers in the Bay who absorbed my spiritual energy, only Askari X can claim my crown! Askari, no matter his mental condition, took the torch of Black Islam and ran to the mountain top shouting, "Laeelahah, elaillah, Elijah Muhammad rassululah!" Askari X went on to honor his master teacher, Master J founder of the Ansaru Allah. But Askari recognized me as the reincarnation of Marcus Garvey and addressed me as Marcus Garvey. I recognized his talent as superior to Tupac or any other rappers. Not only could he sing but he had the Islamic mythology that made him stand taller than other rappers stuck on the low information vibration.

Askari X

Askari X

Biography

Askari X, aka Ansar El Muhammed and Ricky Murdock, is a hip-hop artist from Oakland, California. He has 3 albums and is on many compilation albums and as a guest on several albums. He is famous for coining the term RBG. Stic.man and M-1 of Dead Prez talk about Askari X often in music and credit him as one of their main musical influences.
Askari X is known for black power messages combined with spiritual Islamic themes. His lyrics have a message similar to Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, Marcus Garvey, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X, including the Black Panther mentality and political manifesto of Malcolm X: "by any means necessary." His sound is characterized by slow powerful drum beats and a flow similar to Tupac. His message is similar to rap artists Dead Prez, X-Clan, Immortal Technique, Public Enemy, and Steve B.I.K.O.
Askari X espouses a mixture of ideologies, one being that of a revolutionary, who uses carnal weapons and guns to obtain freedom, along the lines of the Black Panthers and the African People's Socialist Party. The other being that of s/c Black Islam (Teachings of thee Nation of Islam) as taught by Ansar El Muhammad, Thee Select One, thee ALLAH Master J, which is foundated on the teachings of Thee Messenger, Thee Glorious Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, which strictly forbids the use of or even possession of guns or carnal weapons of any sort. Askari X also mixes in various levels glorifying the Thug culture, slang, even drug use at times, all with an intent of capturing the imagination of African American youth with audio imagery similar to the conditions they grow up in. As any movie script writer, director, or producer, Askari X without double standard could be innocent of any negative influence his songs may have on those who listen to his songs.
Askari X stands out from other revolutionary underground hip-hop artists with his powerful, blunt, and direct message in support of the black liberation struggle and for being one of the first artists of the RBG movement. Taking anti-racism to a militant level, Askari X supports a revolution against violent racism that matches the notorious aggression of the white supremacist movement. His genre could be identified as a conscious rap artist.

Black Bird Press News and Review Popular Posts 3/8/18



On Thursday, March 8, 2018, 1:33:06 PM PST, Marvin X Jackmon jmarvinx@yahoo.com [blackantiwar] wrote:


 
cover photo Alicia Mayo
cover design Adam Turner
INTRODUCTION
By Nathan Hare

With the return of “white nationalism” to the international  stage and the White House and new threats of nuclear war, the black revolutionary occupies a crucial position in society today. Yet a black revolutionary of historic promise can live among us almost unknown on the radar screen, even when his name is as conspicuous as Marvin X (who may be the last to wear an X in public view since the assassination of Malcolm X).
This semblance of anonymity is due in part to the fact that the black revolutionary is liable to live a part of his or her life incognito, and many become adept at moving in and out of both public and private places sight unseen. For instance, I didn’t know until I read Marvin X’s  “Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter” that when he put on a memorial service for his comrade and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, 1998, he was unaware that Eldridge’s ex, Kathleen Cleaver, had traveled from the East Coast and slipped into the auditorium of the church with her daughter Joju. As one of the invited speakers I had noticed her curiosity when I remarked that I had been aware of Eldridge before she was (he and I /had had articles in the Negro History Bulletin in the spring of 1962) and had met her before Eldridge did, when I was introduced to her while she was working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Tuskegee institute, but luckily for Eldridge I was happily married to the woman who years later would escort Kathleen around San Francisco in what I recall as a failed search for a black lawyer to take his case when he returned from exile in France.
Like many other persons across this promised land, I also thought I knew Marvin X. I can clearly recall seeing him walk into the offices of The Black Scholar Magazine, then in Sausalito, with a manuscript we published in the early 1970s... However, his reputation had preceded him. For one thing, then California Governor Ronald Reagan had publicly issued a directive to college administrators at UCLA and Fresno State University to get Angela Davis and Marvin X off the campuses and keep them off.
Then over the years I continued to encounter him: when he organized the First National Black Men’s Conference, 1980, Oakland Auditorium, that drew over a thousand black men (without benefit of media coverage) to pay their way into a conference aimed at getting black men to rise again.  I was a member of his Board of Directors. I also attended a number of other conferences he organized, such as the Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness, San Francisco State University, 2001, and the San Francisco Black Radical Book Fair, 2004, as well as productions of his successful play, “One Day in the Life,”  with a scene of his last meeting with his friend, Black Panther Party co-founder, Dr. Huey P. Newton, in a West Oakland Crack house.
I will never forget the time he recruited me and the seasoned psychiatric social worker, Suzette Celeste, MSW, MPA, to put on weekly nighttime workshops in black consciousness and strategies for “overcoming the addiction to white supremacy.” On many a night I marveled to see him and his aides branch out fearlessly into the gloom of the Tenderloin streets of San Francisco and bring back unwary street people and the homeless to participate in our sessions, along with a sparse coterie of the black bourgeoisie who didn’t  turn around or break and run on seeing the dim stairway to the dungeon-like basement of the white Catholic church.
But when I received and read Marvin’s manuscript, I called and told him that he had really paid his dues to the cause of black freedom but regretfully had not yet received his righteous dues.
As if to anticipate my impression, the designer of the book cover has a silhouetted image of Marvin, though you wouldn’t recognize him if you weren’t told, in spite of the flood lights beaming down on him from above like rays directly from high Heaven, as if spotlighting the fact that Marvin ‘s day has come.
You tell me why  one of the blackest men to walk this earth, in both complexion and consciousness, is dressed in a white suit and wearing a white hat; but that is as white as it gets, and inside the book is black to the bone, a rare and readable compendium of Marvin’s unsurpassed struggle for black freedom and artistic recognition.
Black revolutionaries wondering what black people should do now can jump into this book and so can the Uncle Tom: the functional toms find new roles for the uncle tom who longs for freedom but prefers to dance to the tune of the piper; the pathological tom, whose malady is epidemic today, as well as the Aunt Tomasinas, can be enlightened and endarkened according to their taste in this literary and readable smorgasbord.
“Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X” is a diary and a compendium, a textbook for revolutionary example and experience, a guide for change makers, a textbook for Black Studies and community action, including city planners who will profit from his proposals and experiences in his collaboration with the mayor and officials of Oakland to commercialize and energize the inner city, with a Black Arts Movement Business District (BAMBD) that could be the greatest black cultural and economic boon since the Harlem Renaissance.  No longer just talk and get-tough rhetoric, his current project is cultural economics, Oakland’s Black Arts Movement Business District, an urban model evolving in real time in the heart of downtown Oakland, where people like Governor Jerry Brown once tried their hand before they turned and fled back into the claws of the status quo.
I can’t say everything is in this book, just that it reflects the fact that  Marvin, for all he has done on the merry-go-round of black social change, is still in the process of becoming.
Readers from the dope dealer to the dope addict to the progressive elite, the Pan African internationalist, the amateur anthropologist, the blacker than thou, the try to be black, the blacker-than-thous, the try to be white (who go to sleep at night and dream they will wake up white) and other wannabes; in other words from the  Nouveau Black to the petit bourgeois noir and bourgie coconuts, “Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X” is a fountainhead of wisdom, with a fistful of freedom nuggets and rare guidance in resisting oppression or/and work to build a new and better day.
Dr. Nathan Hare
3/8/18

 Dr. Nathan Hare, Father Black and Ethnic Studies, with his student, Marvin X
photo Adam Turner 

Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X
Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare
Black Bird Press, Oakland, April, 2018
limited edition, signed
paperback
500 pages
$29.95
Pre-publication discount price $19.95
To pay by credit card, call 510-200-4164
email: mxjackmon@gmail.com
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