LAST NIGHT A RECORD CHANGED MY LIFE
Black Thought
The Roots’ rhyme technician hails Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988, Def Jam).
I’ve just taken my second class at New York University on the art of the MC. One of the things I spoke about was the evolution of the African griot. Back in the 1400s, 1500s, before the transatlantic slave trade, there was the tradition of the bard or griot in African societies, where a young person aged 12 or 13 is honoured with the responsibility of being the truth-teller, to speak about what’s going on in their village, their culture, their tribe. When they came to the States, griots on plantations came up with a new means of communication that wasn’t completely understandable to the slave masters – negro spirituals.