“If you talk about the hood, rhyme about what’s going on in the hood instead of just rhyming about how you a gang member on record all the time, that shit will get you murdered in real life,” says the Peruvian-born, Harlem-based rapper Immortal Technique, sitting a little straighter in the booth of a Latino diner on 126th and Broadway in Harlem, stabbing the air with his fork.
Tech knows what he’s talking about. As a politically motivated left-wing rapper, he’s faced his share of conflict. There was the time that someone hung a dead animal near his office, presumably as a morbid message for the controversial MC. And death threats? “We got threatening phone calls saying, ‘I’m going to kill you niggers and spics, you fuckin’ communists.’”
It’s not hard to see how conservatives might have a few problems with Immortal Technique. Jadakiss whipped up a media shitstorm with his song “Why?,” when he made an offhand suggestion that forces within the U.S. government might’ve been responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Immortal Technique has written entire songs about that very idea. On “Cause of Death,” from the 2003 album Revolutionary Vol. 2, he rapped: “Just so conservatives don’t take it to heart/I don’t think Bush did it because he isn’t that smart/He’s just a stupid puppet taking orders on his cell phone/From the same people that sabotaged Senator Wellstone.”
There aren’t a whole lot of songs on Revolutionary Vol. 2 or its 2001 predecessor, Revolutionary Vol. 1, that don’t make some mention of government conspiracies or class war, but Tech disputes the claim that he’s exclusively a political rapper. “While there may be two or three songs that are specifically about the government on the album, everything else that I do has a political, or maybe a revolutionary, other angle to it,” he says. “I talk about ‘Harlem Streets,’ which is about gentrification that goes on in the ghetto and the reality of the situations that we live in, how they shipping us out of the ghetto into the military to go fight a war. So people perceive it as just being political, but it’s really just about the streets.
“I tell niggas that if you talk about the hood and what’s really going on in the hood, it’s not long before you say something that people are going to think is political, and you didn’t even mean it to be that way. In my case, I meant for it to be that way. Other niggas don’t like getting near that subject because they like talking about the ghetto in a superficial way.”
Most of the time, interviews with rappers aren’t a whole lot different from interviews with professional athletes. As they see it, they have a lot to lose and not much to gain from revealing their souls to bloodsucking journalists, so they give the shortest answers possible; you rarely get anything more than a terse, inexpressive little grunt. An interview with Immortal Technique isn’t much closer to an actual organic conversation, but it’s a completely different experience in virtually every other sense. For Tech, the day’s interview isn’t an opportunity for self-promotion so much as a platform for his assorted political agendas. He speaks in fully formed paragraphs and each mention of his personal history requires preemption by a look at the world’s dark underbelly. Tech’s idea of a complete answer demands a thorough self-investigation into the events that made the world, and in turn, his world. If you ask him how he ended up moving from Peru to New York as a child, he’ll lecture you on the United States’ covert involvement in the Peruvian civil war. After all, it’s his father’s perspective on the South American country that shaped Tech’s world as a new immigrant in New York. If you ask him about how he hooked up with a frequent collaborator, he’ll tell you about the media’s post-9/11 demonization of Islam. To Tech, the issue itself is more important than the fact that he met the great mixtape-DJ Green Lantern at a High Times convention to discuss the modern portrayal of Muslims on FOX News. Nothing has an easy answer.
But Tech wants to make it absolutely clear that he doesn’t hate America. “America is supposed to be an idea, and then when it doesn’t live up to that, it doesn’t make people hate America to point that out,” he says. “In fact, I love America more than other people do who are willing to accept her however she is. You can call me Captain Save-A-Ho; I just want her to be a respectable lady. Other niggas just slutting her out, and then they look at me like I’m a bastard for pointing out what’s wrong with her. Nah, man. I want to marry her someday. I don’t want her to just be sucking dick for random people. But that’s what these corporations do, just ho America out.”
No aspect of corporate control draws his ire so much as the machinations of the rap industry. “I see the rap game like the slave trade,” Tech says. “You got a whole bunch of black and brown people that are going to get up on an auction block and beg rich white people to get them.”
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