By Jesse Serwer
Immortal Technique is not a political rapper. At least he doesn’t see it that way. For the Harlem MC—best known for a song called “Bin Laden” and a pair of albums titled, simply, Revolutionary, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2—music and politics are not something to be consciously put together: They are inextricably intertwined.
Ask Tech, a.k.a. 29-year-old Felipe Coronel, about beats on his new album, and you’re liable to get an answer that segues into a discussion on the similarities between the current American epoch and the fall of the Roman Empire. (“People in America think that what happens outside this county is not going to effect it. The people of Rome in the 4th century didn’t think anything about the forests of Germany until the Goths smashed down their fuckin’ gates.”) Even those songs from his catalog that are not expressly political— “You Never Know,” from Revolutionary, Vol. 2, about a lost love who died of AIDS, for instance—bluntly confront listeners with social injustice.
Coronel’s third album and his first in five years, The 3rd World (Viper Records), sets out to make the connections between hip-hop and geopolitics even more explicit, by drawing parallels between corporate exploitation of third-world labor and the record industry’s exploitation of musical talent. “Everyone who’s put on by the industry right now was, at some point, ‘underground,’” Coronel says by way of explanation. “At some point, they were told the only way you can make it is by doing this type of music. If you have some real political statements, you might want to tone them down. [The industry says], ‘We need to change your beats, repackage you, your image is gonna be like this. Give us your publishing. Oh yeah, we’re gonna come in for a 360 deal and take your merch and a piece of your shows, too.’ This is similar to things you hear when first-world superpowers and their corporations go to third-world nations and say, ‘In order for you people to be civilized, you need to privitize your water, your diamond industry, oil production.’”
The word in rap journalist circles is that Immortal Technique is difficult when it comes to press coverage. When we meet at the Manhattan studio belonging to Viper Records, the label he runs with drug law activist Jonathan Stuart, Tech doesn’t exactly radiate warmth, but he is not contentious, either, proving to be generous with his time, despite a tight schedule that has him home for the briefest of spells between trips to the West Coast and the UK.
One notable aspect of Tech’s career trajectory is that his profile has increased significantly over a five-year span in which he did not release an album. Instead, a relentless touring schedule that finds him typically performing 100-150 times a year has helped him reach audiences beyond the limited world of underground rap. These travels, particularly those in Latin America, helped steer the Peru-born Tech—whose family fled during the tumultuous internal political conflict of the early ’80s—to his current message as a rapper and human.
“All these things I’ve been seeing kept relating,” he says. “In Venezuela, I took this bus into the mountains where the kids were telling me, ‘The army doesn’t come here, this place is run by gangs.’ [But] the gangs didn’t fuck with the radio station there, which was run by these kids who were like 13 years old. That was inspiring to me, to see very young people with the most meager tools putting them to work in the most efficient manner possible. That’s what we try to do in the underground. We do the most with what we can, and they do the most with what they have there.”
His travels also encouraged him to kick more rhymes en español (see “Golpe De Estado,” featuring Temperamento and Venemo, MCs from Puerto Rico and Peru, respectively). Backed by Green Lantern’s thoughtful production (beats also come from Scram Jones and Buckwild, among others), the album also finds the lyrically dense former battle rapper moving into more song-driven territory.
“I really started writing lyrics and constructing songs when I was in prison,” he says. [See URB #141 or URB.com for details on that.] “There’s no music when you’re locked up. I had to listen to the one hip-hop station that came on once a week, and try to remember the beat…Some rappers get over on the beat, because they’re really not saying too much in a record. I think what I’m trying to do is match that. Be able to say what I want and have beats that are more diverse, stronger, fuller.”
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