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Immortal Technique: Do The Right Thing :: Hip-hop Chomsky Immortal Technique follows the paper trail

By Jesse Serwer   Photography by Buddhabong

06/27/08 :: URB web

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.”

As with previous releases, the plight of the hood and the third world are also connected. See Vol. 2’s “Peruvian Cocaine,” which follows the path of multiple players in the cocaine trade, played by Tech, C-Rayz Walz and Pumpkinhead, among other rappers, from the drug fields to the inner-city. “I think the point of the record was to show people, as fucked up as it is here, it’s 10 times worse overseas,” Tech says. “There’s no poverty [in the U.S.] that’s in any way relatable to something in India or South America or China.”

He illustrates the point with a story about returning to Peru as a youth.

“The lights went out at my grandmother’s house [and] my mother joked, ‘Did you not pay your light bill?’ My grandma was like, ‘No, the rebels have destroyed the power station again. So I guess there will be no light tonight.’ If you said anything even deemed as sympathetic towards the left,  you'd have a black bag over your head. And Peru’s political situation is scratching the surface when you consider El Salvador or Guatemala, places [whose governments] engaged in the most atrocious human rights abuses, backed up by America.”

The 3rd World’s “Harlem Renaissance” revisits the plot of Revolutionary Vol. 2’s similarly-titled “Harlem Streets,” invoking the history of Tech’s long-time hood—specifically how banks redlined the area as a no-loan zone once it became predominantly African-American—to illustrate how recent improvements are meant to drive out longtime residents, not benefit them. When Tech puts gentrification into terms like “economic ethnic cleansing,” one wonders why more rappers aren’t tackling the topic, which is dramatically altering some of hip-hop’s most famed hoods—from Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy to ‘Ye and ‘Pe’s native Southside Chicago—as we speak. To this, Tech has a simple explanation.

“A lot of rappers don’t live in the hood no more,” he says, laughing at the thought.

“They live in some mansion, [so] what happens in the ghetto that gave them the street cred to become successful in the first place no longer effects them. It’s funny when people scream about how they’re from the hood, like that’s gonna do something for their sales. No one fuckin’ cares where you’re from. Ooohh, scary. Are they gonna reach through the CD and murder [you]? In order to represent where you’re from, you have to talk about the issues going on [there]. If you’re a rapper from Palestine, and there’s nothing about the occupation in your music then what the fuck?”

His latest project, meanwhile, has nothing to do with rap. Inspired to action by April’s shocking Sean Bell verdict—in which Judge Arthur Cooperman acquitted the cops who killed Bell, an unarmed black man, in a hail of 50 shots, on all charges against them—Tech has set about collecting written, first-hand testimonials about police brutality he is calling the “Police State Chronicles.”

“So far, we’ve collected about 700 stories, including one of my own from when I was 13 and cops beat up my friend in front of me,” Tech says. Once he obtains 1,000, he intends to present them to the U.S. State Department, Congress and various citizen complaint review boards, “to really express to people and show them this isn’t an isolated incident that just happened to Sean Bell or to Amadou Diallo.
“This is a pattern, [that’s] not so much about race as the power of a state to deprive an individual of due process and take their life without any sort of accountability.”

 CONTINUES

MORE IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE

-Immortal Technique Cover Story 2006

-Immortal Technique "The 3rd World" MP3 stream