“To say there is a bogeyman means we don’t have to change the lightbulb.”
DISPATCH: Killer Mike lectures at MIT
By Chris Faraone
About a dozen journalists, college and professional alike in awe of Run The Jewels as per their conversations in the hallway, shuffled in and pulled up chairs still warm from Friday classes. Killer Mike was seated, waiting for his pupils by a wall of chalkboards tagged with stray equations, slowly picking at a plate of fresh fruit on his desk.
“You’ll have to speak up.” A smile clean across his beard, Mike apologized for being hard of hearing. “My ears are shot. I’m a musician.”
The first question from a student, about the “slave and slave master construct” of the music industry, cut directly to the topic of the visit: race relations in the United States. In turn Mike skipped any small talk, right away setting the tone for his installment of the ongoing MIT Hip Hop Speaker Series. For two-and-a-half hours, in class with the reporters then nearby on a leather couch in an unusually intimate lecture hall, no punches would be pulled or words whispered.
“We have been used and abused and we know that.” Mike equated the major label system to “sharecropping,” which he said differs from outright slavery only in that there is a carrot to chase. The MC also called for more minority-owned labels — “We need more Rocafellas, we need more Bad Boys” — and for overall rap liberation, propping his accomplice in RTJ on that front.
“What El-P said 20 years ago was right — be independent as fuck.” Responding to approving grins, Mike turned up the rhetorical dial. “If you want to pull out of that construct, you have to start your own farm. If you’re an abolitionist, you’re not going to get money from the federal government, so you have to get it on your own.”
A graduate of Morehouse College, the 40-year-old Mike’s academic and activist stripes are as impressive as his rap credentials, and of late he’s leveraged RTJ’s enormous popularity to amplify progressive messages — lecturing and writing op-eds, attending tonight’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, challenging media outside of the hip-hop paradigm.
