spacious skies. (produced by apex, lyrics by yours truly ill ana invincible)

recollect when we first met
friends of yours advised me come pursue ya
hypnotized under your spell and smell
sprung by your perfume
i flew over- no delay or run ins with the steward
yeah, our love was younger newer then
when we were honeymooners
now our days w/ sun are fewer
nights are numbered lunar
eclipse the glitter and glitz
hate to admit
Dismissed a hundred rumors
as imaginations figments
spread like tumors
diagnosed malignant
radiation patient hunting for the cure
you're so immature
unreliable, never liable
blaming the entire globe
and call em evil doers
but i'm sure
there's no reparations
for sweat and lost energy
considered best comrades
became my worst enemy
hurtful abusive
blood curdles and oozes
under the surface of epidermis
the purplest bruises
truth is-
ya gorgeous
but hunger for power gorges
with armed forces
contorts ya slim figure to enormous

OH BEAUTIFUL
With ya spacious skies
I wanna love u but u hide behind a fake disguise
OH BEAUTIFUL

planned your birthday party for JULY 4th
I was dis-invited
ride your high horse-to a black tie affair with your peers
who can apply force

oh beautiful
really wanna make this fit
promised me to change ya ways
But keep on repeating the same mistakes and slip
blow your candles make a wish
erase the taste
in meltin pots
blood on auction blocks
now felons caught in cells I seldom thought
we'd 86 relationships
obsolete like laser discs
jealous thoughts possessive so in
self defense I'm raising fists
still u fail to hear
the trail of tears
and broken treaties
Border Walls we
Wrote graffiti
Tag it like your Toe
You'll go alone and greedy
even though u know u need me
No pretending we Co-dependent
u killin in my name I get the blame
Your co-defendant
so much arrogance its an embarrassment
go see a therapist
for your paranoia of terrorists while terrorizing
analyze the flaws in ur character
Do u really love me-or just lust- for power, America?

I remember watching television shows from the US when i was a little kid living in the Middle East, and being obsessed with U.S. culture. Watching the Cosby Show and thinking "wow racism must be over, everyone must be living the american dream." When I moved here it was a slap in the face to see first hand the subtle and not so subtle ways that this country thrives off oppression and injustice. When I met Grace Lee Boggs, I learned about the struggle of her and her late husband, Jimmy Boggs, for a second American revolution based on the quote: "Love America enough to change it, Not just because my ancestors blood is in the soil, but because I see the potential of what it could become." I see this concept as relevant today beyond nationalism, on a local/global level - love your block, love the world enough to change it. The sky is the limit.

We can still redefine and reshape our communities...not only through developing self reliant and sustaining communities that relate to each other in new and respectful ways, but also through music, lyrics, and direct action!
one prime example is this powerful video my friend Salina sent me:



the possibilities are endless!!!
and no we don't apologize ;)

locusts.



after you watch it please go to the site and register and vote and comment about how this relates to your city!

"you want change? its a daily choice."

in this cold cold world full of clear channel and radio one controlled radio stations there are few airwaves based places one can seek refuge.
Two of my favorite HipHop havens happen to be based in Cali-
DIVINE FORCES RADIO hosted by Fidel Rodriguez (on KPFK in LA) and HARD KNOCK RADIO
hosted by Davey D, Weyland Southon, Anita Johnson and Tsadae Abeba Neway.
Both of them WORLD PREMIERED the single off my looongawaited solo debut: ShapeShifters, in the midst of fund-drive week for that matter, they still squoze in a lot of love for lil ol me. and i couldn't be more honored. Many thanks to both of them FORREAL!
Weyland at HardKnock took it a step further by doing a whole interview situation including a healthy dose of bling47 representation...check it out HERE
big ups to the multi talented Esther on engineering!!!

Another not limited to HipHop favorite radio treat is the segment by my homie Nora from the West Coast (the Bay to be exact) who was in the West Bank (Deheishe refugee camp to be exact) with me and Mariana from Detroit Summer's Live Arts Media Project in August. She worked with us on the Youth Solidarity Network LAMP cd and did some fierce reporting while out there as well.
Nora recently interviewed me for her segment on the show FLASHPOINTS, which is on the pacifica station in berkley, KPFA just like HARDKNOCK.
the interview comes in around 24 minutes into the show (click around the middle of the line) and breaks down alot of the organizing i participate in. Nora knows exactly the right things to ask and is the SHIT overall. dont sleep!
as a matter of fact...if you have time also check out her interview with Detroit Summer co-founder GRACE LEE BOGGS 30 MINUTES INTO IT...
now if only we can get some radio like that in the D!!!

yet i still rep REAL hard for the double X chromosome. This includes my crew the ANoMoLIES (check out my top friend if you haven't already), but also many others who are holding down the topic with some sense through a critical lens...
last month i had the opportunity to sit on two panels with some BRILLIANT folks of this sort, and tried to do my best to sound as smart as them lol...

The first event was sponsored by Columbia College institute for women and gender...my homie and incredible emcee: ANG13 invited me to this one.(good lookin out fam!!!) Us two and Unmuvabo Vendetta broke bread with Natalie Y. Moore (who used to live in the D!!)
One of my most ridiculous moments is at 41 minutes where i'm going OFF on the sponsor of the event...Boeing!

WONDA WOMEN PROJECT POST FILM DISCUSSION

While in chicago for the first event i reconnected with the one and only Bakari Kitwana (author of The Hip-Hop Generation) who puts on Rap Sessions about race, gender, and hiphop politics on campuses around the country.
A week later he invited me to come thru to a women/gender and HipHop panel at Stanford called "DOES HIP HOP HATE WOMEN?" (come to find out i was filling in for a legend...YOYO!!! cuz she was off filming segments of the woman rapper show on VH1...no pressure or anything).
one of the ILLEST hiphop radio journalists...Mr. Davey D himself...came through and taped the panel then aired it:

HARD KNOCK RADIO...DOES HIPHOP HATE WOMEN? PANEL AT STANFORD WED OCT 24TH

if you have time to listen to a WHOLE lotta yappin then this is for u!
check em out and lemme know what u think!!!

CHECK IT OUT FRONT COVER BOTTOM RIGHT CORNER...SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE DETROIT EDUCATION CRISIS...AND ITS GRASSROOTS YOUTH LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY EDUCATION PROJECTS UTILIZING HIPHOP AND MEDIA!!!! BIG UP TO BIKO ON THIS ONE...
what i thought i was gonna be a little blurb in the activism section turned out to be this:














wanna learn more about Detroit Summer LAMP?
check out www.myspace.com/detroit_summer
or www.detroitsummer.org to order a CD!!!!!!

since i dont have a motor city Ride i never leave the crib...the illest photographer this side of the mississippi, Doug Coombe, recently came thru to build about my humble abode. check it out here:

http://metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=11100

Motor City Cribs
Invincible roosts on Detroit's Grand Boulevard
by Doug Coombe
8/1/2007

Progressive-headed hip-hop emcee Invincible (Ilana Weaver) fell in love with southwest Detroit when she lived in New York City. She'd usually hop a Greyhound and get off in Detroit and chill out at the Vinewood Women's Collective in southwest before heading on to Ann Arbor.

When Invincible moved back to Detroit in 2002 (to work with a youth collective called Detroit Summer), it made sense to take an apartment on West Grand Boulevard. She's been in her current crib for two years now, her third on the Boulevard. It's nestled between two abandoned houses and sports a balcony, a garden and a backyard fire pit.

Not that she's home much. Ilana travels, tours and collaborates all over the country. She's lent her lyrical skills to everyone from the all-female Anomolies crew out of New York City to Carl Craig's Detroit Experiment, Athletic Mic League, Underground Resistance and Waajeed and Platinum Pied Pipers.

Her own mindbendingly sharp album Shapeshifters drops in spring. That's after she returns from Palestine. She left last Sunday for a couple of weeks as part of the U.S.-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network, which helps teach Palestinian kids arts and media skills to help them tell their stories. Ilana lived in Israel until she was 7 years old.

"If you're from the Middle East you get politicized early," she says.

Invincible's an activist at heart: Where others see problems, she sees opportunities for new community-based solutions. And that's exactly how she sees the D and why she loves her West Grand crib. "I love the Boulevard," she says. "You can take it all over the city and see a different side of the city at each turn."




also check out the one the following week about my homie Monica Blaire...its fresh.




more updates about recent travels and shapeshifters and all the other crap soon...stay tuned!!!

In Her Twilight, 91-Year-Old Activist Shines Brighter Than Ever
By JONATHAN TILOVE

DETROIT — In a two-story brick house with red trim and a leaky roof, Grace Lee Boggs, 91, is plotting revolution.

That in itself is nothing new. She's been doing the same from this very house for 45 years. It was here, at the corner of Field and Goethe on Detroit's east side, that Grace and her husband James midwifed the birth of the black power movement — producing pamphlets, manifestos and books on racism, class struggle and revolution, creating one organization after another bent on making it happen, and turning their living room into a crossroads for generations of black radicals.

They were a most unlikely couple, Grace and Jimmy. She is an Ivy League-educated philosopher, the daughter of Chinese immigrants; he was a black autoworker and organic intellectual who never shed the deep country dialect of his native Marion Junction, Ala.

What is new, and kind of startling, is that 14 years after her husband's death, Boggs is in demand as never before.

Already there were radio appearances, speaking engagements, the weekly column for the black-oriented Michigan Citizen, the ceaseless churning of a dialectical mind synthesizing everything in sight. She is soon to appear on "Bill Moyers' Journal'' (www.pbs.org/moyers), and seems on the verge of trading her cult status in this forsaken city for something bigger.

"It's getting a little overwhelming,'' she says. "And it's going to get worse.''

In her twilight, Grace Lee Boggs shines more brightly than ever.

"The variety of people who beat a path to her door is just astonishing,'' marvels John Maguire, who retired in 1998 as president of California's Claremont Graduate University and now directs its Institute for Democratic Renewal. Maguire recommended Boggs to Moyers, a lifelong friend.

"She really has come into her own,'' says Stephen Ward, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Michigan who is writing a book about the Boggses.

Scott Kurashige, a professor of American culture at Michigan, is working with Boggs on a book of her writings since the 1998 publication of her autobiography, "Living for Change.'' "People can see she's lived a very long, full and meaningful life,'' he says.

More remarkable than her longevity is her agility.

"She's never been stuck,'' says Ilana "Invincible'' Weaver, a 26-year-old Detroit hip-hop artist and activist who counts herself among Boggs' disciples. "She's always willing to change.''

Boggs' mind blazes, synapses sparking like a fireworks display, illuminating a world as yet unseen. Even old friends confess leaving her company winded by her breathless pursuit of what's new and what's next.

Have you read world systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein ("He's coming to Detroit for my 100th birthday'') on the instability of global capitalism? Or political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on how globalization and the decline of the nation-state are inspiring a multitude of singular grass-roots movements that collectively, she says, "are much more participatory than the democracies we're used to''?

What about organization consultant Margaret Wheatley, whose work, Boggs says, indicates how small organic actions can together have consequence "far beyond what you can imagine''? Or Paul Hawken, co-author of "Natural Capitalism'' (he used to sell gardening tools with a man named Smith), who says that it would take a month to scroll like film credits through the names of all the groups working around the world on social justice and ecological sustainability?

One moment she is quoting "runaway nun'' Karen Armstrong, and the next Starhawk, the anti-globalization, anarchist, ecofeminist witch. Throughout, she is bounding out of her comfortable chair to fetch another book or article to place in evidence.

Boggs still believes in revolution. But, as she told a diverse, standing-room-only crowd at the left-wing Brecht Forum in New York's West Village in early May, "We have to change our concept of revolution. It's about how we transform not just Bush and Cheney but ourselves.''

Dismissive of Martin Luther King Jr. in his lifetime as sentimental and naive, Boggs has in recent years embraced him as truly revolutionary, from the transformative humanizing power of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, to his explicit call for a "revolution of values'' away from materialism and militarism and toward "agape — the love that is ready to go to any length to restore community.''

Boggs was born in Providence, R.I., and at 8 moved to New York City, where her father opened a nearly thousand-seat Chinese restaurant on Broadway. By 25, she had her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College.

"I was lucky I came along before the women's movement,'' she says, or she might have ended up an academic with tenure, a parking space and a gilded, gelded radicalism.

Instead, she became associated with the brilliant West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James in a faction known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency. That brought her to Detroit and to Jimmy Boggs, who had grown up outside Selma, then rode the rails to Detroit and work in a Chrysler plant.

They were comrades but barely friends until the day Grace invited him home to dinner. He arrived two hours late, complained about the food and the music she played (at the time he thought Louis Armstong an Uncle Tom), and asked her to marry him. "To my surprise,'' she wrote, "I said yes.''

She was his wife and collaborator — making lentil soup, typing, editing, hosting, thinking, organizing and writing.

In 1964, she coordinated the campaign to create the all-black-but-for-Grace Michigan Freedom Now Party and field a full slate of candidates. They asked Malcolm X to run for the Senate, but he declined. Grace was the party's candidate for Michigan State trustee, getting 26 votes.

In the summer of 1967 — 40 years ago; she was 52 — Detroit erupted in five days of violence that left 43 dead.

"The police called it a riot, because it was obviously a breakdown of law,'' Boggs says. "The people called it a rebellion because it was seen as a very righteous uprising against the white occupation army — the police — and also against the idea, the reality, that the city, though becoming majority black, was still being run almost exclusively by whites.''

The Boggses were vacationing in California at the time. "When we came back the people were jubilant,'' she recalls.

And they read in the Detroit News that they were two of the six activists responsible for the uprising. (This spring, the News named her one of its Michiganians of the year.)

"The kind of documentary evidence that makes for a conclusion will be difficult to produce for some time,'' wrote the renowned black journalist Louis Lomax. "Yet Detroit's responsible Negroes are casting a jaundiced eye at six persons in their community: attorney Milton Henry and his brother Richard; Edward Vaughn, a bookstore owner and black power advocate; the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., pastor of the Central United Church of Christ, and John (sic) Boggs and his Chinese wife, Grace Lee Boggs.''

"These individuals,'' Lomax wrote, "comprise what is without doubt the strangest black power amalgam in America.''

Of the six, only Grace Boggs still lives in Detroit.

Cleage, who transformed his church into the Shrine of the Black Madonna, died in 2000. (Detroit's current mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, grew up in the church.) Vaughn moved back home to Dothan, Ala., a few years ago to tend to his mother in her last years, and leads a revived Alabama NAACP. Milton Henry died in 2006. His brother, Richard, who changed his name to Imari Obadele, moved to Mississippi to try to establish a separate Republic of New Africa. He now lives in Baton Rouge, La.

"I don't think the people who erupted in July 1967 did so because of us,'' Boggs says today. "It's nevertheless true that the climate in Detroit was politically different because of all the propaganda, agitation and organization that had gone on.''

In 1965, the Boggses wrote an influential essay, "The City Is the Black Man's Land.'' The "civil disorder'' in Detroit, and a week earlier in 1967 in Newark, N.J., were watershed events in its fulfillment. Blacks seized political power in one city after another. The black middle class grew.

But the Boggses also saw how economically expendable black young people were cast even further adrift, swept along by a victim mentality that licensed crime and violence behind a "badge of militancy and blackness.'' In 1972 they published a pamphlet, "Crime Among Our People,'' challenging those who would turn blackness into a commodity or an excuse. They called on the community not to put up with it and not to buy stolen goods.

These days, Boggs trades heavily in hope.

In Detroit especially, she says, folks don't need to be told how bad things are. They need to believe they can do something about it — plant a tree, grow their own food, paint a mural, ride a bike, clean up a corner. She evangelizes for Detroit as a de-industrialized mecca for those who would create something self-sustaining amid the wreckage of this onetime citadel of capitalism.

"New Yorkers need to hear about the hope that exists in the wasteland of Detroit,'' Boggs declares at the Brecht. "In vacant lots there is the opportunity to begin anew.''

"I'm glad she's still around,'' says General Baker, an old comrade from the Freedom Now Party. But planting flowers? Is this, he wonders, what the movement has come to?

After Jimmy Boggs' death, friends created the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership and bought the couple's home, which they had only rented, so Grace could continue to live and work there. One of its programs is Detroit Summer, enlisting young people to "rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up.''

Mostly, the center has created a cadre of new activists, like Ilana Weaver, who says that Grace gives lie every day to the libel that activism is but "a phase'' young people go through. "It's a life choice,'' Weaver says.

Now, on the cusp of 92, Grace Lee Boggs is reaping the whirlwind of that life choice, and glad of it.

"This,'' she says, "is going to be an interesting year.''

(Jonathan Tilove can be contacted at jonathan.tilove(at)newhouse.com)
http://www.newhouse.com/in-her-twilight,-91-year-old-activist-shines-brighter-than-ever.html

TOP TEN HIGHLIGHTS AND LESSONS LEARNED ON THIS TOUR (in no particular order)

10. aspirin thins your blood and makes you more likely to lose your voice. dont take it even if u have a cold and are in pain. especially if you are bout to go on tour in europe for two weeks and already have a voice condition. also...make sure to read the directions and fine print on your voice steroids before u take them. dont swallow all 7 for ur daily dose at once... or u will feel in a daze and tingly all over...unless u into that sorta thing. then again...those really got my voice thru the tour...(BIG SHOUT TO VENU!)
9. in europe, if u ask for water, 99 percent of the time u will get fizzy water...i never knew how hard it is to find 'still water'at a club before this tour...and also...budapest's bottled water is suspect...especially 'NAIVE' dont fall for it...next worst taste to soilent green homie.
8. media misrepresentations of of race really influence people all over the world to mis use the "N word" including this one black man at a show tellin me its all good his drunk belligirent white boy friend thinks its ok to point at him and yell "neeeka" and swear up and down its a compliment cuz "u know...eets like...i am neeeka from dah hooood" i was like..."i'll punch him for u if u want...i have a big ring on...lol"(to give some perspective on why he might have kept excusing his boy...he was one of 5 black men in that whole club..trying to stay alive...shit is real)
7. EUROPE LOVES THEM SOME DILLA...and DETROIT...i really wish everyone back home could see for themselves how much. you would be amazed.
6. our tour manager MARTIN can drive 10 hours straight...with little to no sleep...thru some of the thickest fog i have ever seen...and still hold us down if the promoter is slippin...now THATS OFFICIAL SUN!!!
5. everyone on the tour was GOOD and REAL...nobody on no ego bullshit...everybody bonded in a way none of us expected...from APEX's wife calling the hotel phone when everyone but me got stuck in between doors after getting locked out of our hotel and having to break in... (i'll let him tell u that story)to spending new years eve with STATIK djing in the living room...with karin from SUBOTAGE and her people...watching the whole city get taken over by pyromaniacs...it was a beautiful thing.


4. STACY's voice modulater breaking the first nite (took us forever to figure out the power conversion situation) and her still rockin shit every single nite...BLINK BLINK SUN!

get ur hands to the ceiling we playin with ur emotions!
3.BAHAMADIA is one of the most down talented and down to earth artists in this game...every crowd reflects this...and brings out mad good ppl...and more women than u usually see at hiphop shows...all inspired and supported to do this themselves...i learned more than i can begin to explain from this woman...both as an artist...and as a powerful SURVIVOR of struggle...who chooses to constantly grow and inspire others to grow.
2. abundance mentality undoes lack...meaning there's always enuff for everyone if u approach it from that angle. at least thats the way the whole tour went.
1. in the famous words of haam... "DIN NIN!!!!!!"

now lets do this stateside fam!!!

A couple nights before me and Stacy Epps left cali for Europe, I had the honor to share the stage with DJ Suprema One, Mark Gonzales, Skim (with Soul speak), Stacy, the Phillistines and the Nomads at Ocean Coast College..we were warmly greeted by more security than heads in attendance..had us lined up waiting in the rain while thoroughly searching us and all our bags to set the mood of a checkpoint for the Palestine/immigrants rights nature of the event. The cali nite was doing its best Detroit winter impersonation..so my boy O let me borrow his green kufiya..and at the end of the evening when we parted ways after a dope show..he kindly let me hold on to it..It was my only scarf on this trip to europe.

(crew shot backstage in nuremberg)

In Nuremberg.. a few nights prior to our show in Leipzig the tour manager (Martin) takes me aside...tells me the promoter from Leipzig is very concerned about my performance there...cuz of something they saw on my myspace page having to do with Palestine.
Martin explains to me the political context there:
Leipzig is in east germany. One of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Post industrial brain drain. (similar to the D *1) but of the few people who stay there..many are poor unemployed and uneducated..perfect targets to get recruited by lots of neo nazi and fascist groups. And listen to this chara *2..alot of the neo nazis out in Leipzig (and everywhere in germany actually) wear kufiyas and march in pro palestine rallys.(huh?)
Basically the neo nazis there have coopted the Palestine Solidarity movement. They do this as a divide and conquer strategy to confuse people to believe anti Zionism means the same thing as anti Jewish. It is an old tactic..but people still fall for it.
The club where we are rockin is also a community center...and they are anti rasict and anti fascist/anti-neo-nazi...so somehow that makes them pro Israel (huh?) as a way not to be affiliated with the Neo Nazi or Fascist groups..at least that's what their short explanation of the reasoning was. *3


This Lebanon psa:

would set off my shows (where they had the right equipment set up)
Martin, the tour manager, said he sees no possible misunderstanding with my show with the exception of the video.. and advises it's not a good idea in leipzig...just in case there is a language barrier and people take it to resemble neo nazi or fascist rhetoric. I was very resistant to taking this powerful video out, but my first priority is to be effective at conveying my basic message clearly, so I took heed to his suggestion. But that meant to me...if i'm not showing the video...then I have to talk more about the situation myself..in a clear way that leaves little room for them to misconstrue.
When we arrive to the club i ask to talk to the promoter..but his english isn't that good..he starts in right away...
"people saw a link from ur myspace...it is no good..they complain when they saw it..that it is anti jewish.."
i was scratchin my head...like what could it be?
couldnt figure out what would be offensive or misinterpreted from my page
he's like
"i'll show u later..online in the office."
We talk for over an hour... Martin helps translate the intense discussion.
The promoter tells me he has a problem with me wearing the kufiya
cuz the Nazis/fascist around here wear kufiyas.
and i explain to him how I believe the nazis wear kufiyas as a tactic to confuse the true meaning of that symbol..*4
…that I can't let Nazis take away the reason and meaning why I put it on this morning.
He keeps telling me he understands...he agrees...but is concerned all the drunk people in the crowd won't get it...might get pissed.
Especially cuz the club has an 'OFFICIAL DRESS CODE AGAINST KUFIYAS!'
he explains.. if i broke that rule...he would hear from all the regular club goers. I would be making a mess and leaving town for them to clean it up.
we speak for a long time. My already hoarse voice getting lost further in in the ethers. Especially as it gets more heated.
i ask him...
"if u giving me this much trouble...wut if a palestinian group wanted to perform here?"
...at first he's like,
"probly not"
..i get pissed...
"well then I'm not down to perform here either if that's the case."
...he takes it back...
"aaaah..i misunderstood...we would have to review their lyrics first..then we will see if they can perform."
The convo keeps going in circles..not getting anywhere...cuz he kept reffering to nazis wearing kufiyas and the video link on my page..
so i was like just show me this damn video..lets see wut all the hype is about.
He takes me up to the office...clicks on free the p link...then scrolls down and clicks the link for SLINGSHOT HIPHOP! (www.slingshothiphop.com)
(www.slingshothiphop.com)

I'm sorta shocked…
"u have a problem with this????! have u even watched it?"
he says
"not really..but alot of people have complained"
so I say-
"we can watch it together and u show me what's the problem"
all three of us sit thru it..
and I'm so pissed at this point just making sarcastic jokes.
"does it offend u this part where they rap in the comb...do people think it's anti semetic how they do each others hair?"
he watches the whole thing and finally after watching it all the way thru says...
"ok fine...theres nothing wrong with it"
"see this is the problem...people at ur club always assume anything pro palestine is anti jewish or neo nazi affiliated...they didn't even watch this and automatically came to that conclusion..that's really sad."*5
"there's probably people in ur club that feel the same way I do and their voices and symbols get silenced here too.."
"I wont take off the kufiya, and I will speak on the issue at hand where it makes sense..cuz I already took out the video..I'm not bending anymore..if u don't want me to say what I have to say you can cancel my show"
he says he won't censor me....just warn me it might be a lot of bad reactions and misunderstandings.
Only 20 minutes to prep before the show and regain my voice.



(pic of me stacy and bahamadia right before I get on stage)
The kufiya stayed on in the beginning of the show (before the lights started blazing)..mostly during our Dilla tribute..they love them some J in Leipzig!
First off I give the club props for the good work they do against fascism and rasicm..then during the freestyle someone gives me the word "Solidarity" and I have a chance to freestyle acapella on the topic for a while… I blacked out so I don't know what I actually said…something like…
"we gotta stand side by side even when the Nazis try to conquer and divide"
I save "no compromises" (from Free the P) for last..and during the intro over Nina's "Feeling Good" I have a chance to explain to the crowd in the clearest way what's on my shoulders.
"fascism is some bullshit...rasicm is some bullshit...and zionism is some bullshit.
Also...as a person of European jewish heritage we are taught to say never again. I believe never again means never again EVERYWHERE." *6 *7
The crowd feels me..at least they are doing all the calls and response etc..but I cant tell if anyone really understands until the end of the night.
the very last person that comes up to buy a cd from me was this woman...
she asks me if the venue gave me trouble for my kufiya..she thanks me for what I had to stay on stage..tells me she feels the same way.. but gets shut down all the time at this venue because people are so close minded to any criticism of Israel.
She was the "one person" that made all this drama worth it. and made the whole night feel even that much more purposeful.
Hopefully she can start organizing around Palestine solidarity out there...in a way that reclaims it from those fucking fascists.(neo nazi and Zionist alike)
Hopefully she and her friends can call out and contend with the anti Palestinian sentiment underlying this issue within Leipzig.


NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN EVERYWHERE...*8


NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN EVERYWHERE...



me and bahamadia at the german holocaust memorial in berlin.


THANK YOU to everyone on the tour...yall had my back-..Statik Bahamadia Stace and Apex...by the way martin is the illest tour manager forreal!!
Big up to IJSN folks for the support..the last minute skype chats and calls.
and many thanks to amb for listening...

this is an important event...fundraising for the survivors of a horrible injustice amongst us...read the story below...and PLEASE REPOST AND SPREAD THE WORD!!! in love n struggle, i

Detroit Asian Youth Project
Open Mic Show!

6pm, Thursday Nov. 16th!
St Raymond's Parish
20103 Joann St, Detroit, MI

FOOD, Poetry, community and fundraising!!

At this event, we will be collecting donations and distributing
information about Chon Buri Xiong who was fatally shot 27 times by the
Warren Police.

On September 17, 18 year old Chon Buri Xiong was fatally shot 27 times
in his home by Warren police. The Xiong family has suffered a great
tragedy and is very upset about the incident. However, the Macomb
County Prosecutor has closed the case, stating that the police
officers were justified in their actions. The Xiong Family's side of
the story has not been taken seriously by the authorities, or by the
media which has only written from the police perspective. The Xiong
family needs money to help cover funeral and housing expenses. Every
donation will contribute greatly.

Detroit Asian Youth (DAY) Project was launched in 2004 and works with
Asian American youth in Detroit to develop leadership skills and raise
awareness for social justice. DAY Project engages in community-based
projects that foster a greater understanding of Detroit and its Asian
American community.

More info:
www.xanga.com/DAY_Project
www.myspace.com/detroitasinyouthproject