Metal Lungies

Great interview with Professor Griff over at Buffalo’s Artvoice paper. The part that really messed with me:

Griff: No, not at all. There’s a gentleman who wrote a book called Hip-Hop Decoded, and his name is The Black Dot, and it really opened my eyes. And then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney pointed things out to me that were just mindblowing…[she] gave me documents showing that we were under surveillance, that black rap and hip-hop artists were under surveillance. I went to go look into it, thinking that, okay, I’ll find one article, maybe two. I started uncovering document after document after document, not only on myself and Public Enemy but just the average artists—hell, Chingy. Chingy? I’m like, he’s the cutest little guy in music, man. What is he threatening? You know if they’ve got a file on his ass, you know what they have on me.

Seriously—they don’t want strong black intelligent men in the industry, that’s not going to sell out, that’s actually going to do right by the people. Some white people look at this, they say, “Well, if he’s doing right and making a sacrifice by his people, we ain’t got nothing to worry about.” But there are some segments of the human family that’s not looking at it like that. They looking at this thing like, “Griff is a threat. Public Enemy is a threat. We can’t have too many Public Enemy groups out there like that.”

It goes much further than the Hip-Hop Police my friends, we would love to see someone get a hand on these files (any lawyers good with the freedom of information act out there?). Read the rest of the interview for PG’s thoughts on topics like NWA, current artists and his documentary project Turn Off Channel Zero. (Artvoice gets a pass on butchering the names of Jean Grae & Snoop Dogg (?!)).