by Omar Burgess
posted February 24, 2011
hiphopdx.com
With
less than a week of Black History Month remaining, Mike Bigga tells 3 Little
Digs about the significance of cultural education.
Whether he’s incorporating Malcolm X speeches into his songs or calling
a Detective Marc Cooper (one of the officers charged with reckless endangerment
in the 2008 shooting of Sean Bell) a “race-trading bastard less than trash”
Killer Mike has never been shy on the issue of Black Nationalism. As February
draws to a close, Mike took a break from his recording session at Treesound
Studios to tell 3 Little Digs about the importance of Black History Month.
“I think Black History Month is important for blacks in and outside the
United States of America,” Mike explained. “Often times, black nations
have been nations that have been conquered and just decimated by people. With
being conquered and decimated, a lot of times, your history gets forgotten forever
or just rearranged and changed. Not enough school children know that the face
of The Sphinx used to be a face of Negro features. And Napoleon [Bonaparte]
ordered 21 shots to blow the nose off the face.”
Mike added that his Pan-African influence came from his grandparents, due to
his grandfather attending Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. During a recent
photo shoot, which featured Mike paying homage to Black Panther Party co-founder
Huey P. Newton, Mike said he got a reminder of how little some people know about
black history.
“One of the video models, who was in her mid-twenties, said, ‘Who
was Huey Newton, a drug dealer?’” Mike recounted. “So her
expectation was that all rappers try to emulate drug dealers and not necessarily
revolutionaries. I found it a little shameful that this young woman didn’t
know who Huey Newton was. I responded to her, ‘He’s the reason you
have free breakfast in the schools…’”
Mike’s discussion was part of an ongoing series with 3 Little Digs. His
upcoming album, PL3DGE, is scheduled to be released on March 22.
Click
here to purchase the lead single for his upcoming album @ RareHipHop.com
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