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IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE
THE 3RD WORLD
IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE: THE 3rd WORLD
DROPS JUNE 24th
Be it battle lyrics, be it hardcore lyrics, be it revolutionary lyrics, Immortal Technique is just plain lyrical. Hailing from Harlem via Peru Immortal Technique has been bringing his brand of revolutionary music and movement around the globe. With his up coming release “The 3rd World” (Dropping June 24th) Immortal is about to unleash that lyrical fury that been burning to lash out. S1 recently caught up with Immortal Technique just off tour and this is what he had to say:
S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah…What’s going on my niggas, you know who this is!!! It’s the mother fucking man S1, Legacy Radio, Legacy Magazine, Legacymag.net and listen man you know how I get down you know that I don’t fuck around, I always do my homework. This particular interview took me a bit of work but I got it for you, I got my boy Immortal Technique…What’s good big dawg?
IT: I’m here, I’m in good mood even though it’s raining outside…I’m getting a lot of work done…
S1: Now for those individuals that don’t know just bring us up to par on who Immortal Technique is and what he’s been up to baby?
IT: Well I mean I originally started out, you know battling in the street and then I tried to put together music and singles like other underground artists…But all I saw was them doing was putting out vinyl singles…Whack…So I felt like I wanted to do something different so when I released called Revolutionary Vol. 1, I was a very young kid at the time but I wanted to throw whatever songs I’d written when I was locked up and the stuff I got when I was free and I basically put this music out and put the album out and it sold real well…So I figured…Man…I got a Revolutionary Vol. 1 I might as well make a Revolutionary Vol. 2 and it was funny because a lot of people come out with their mixtapes and they would be such and such Vol. 1, I would never see a Vol. 2…And I was like what the hell happened did ya’ll go out of business or something, so I was like fuck it I’m not going to disappoint people I’ll put together Revolutionary Vol. 2 I got my brother locked behind bars right Mumia Abdul Jamal to work with me and off the success of that record you know what I mean I worked with different distributors, I sold a lot of units on my own, I basically built myself up and I joined with an old family friend to bring back to life this company called Viper Records which then worked with me to put out the rest of my music and toured the world…You know to me it was all about bringing street hip hop and that culture of hardcore music with a message cause that’s what it first started out being…Simple as it was NWA had a message, Ice Cube had a more complicated message, you know Ice-T, people like Nas, Raekwon, Ghostface and the whole Wu-Tang…Basically I took it from a perspective that cause you speak to the streets don’t mean you can’t be lyrical, you know what I mean, that’s the invention the industry came up with…Oh you got to dumb down your lyrics to reach the hood, I never saw it that way I knew people in my hood in Harlem they love hearing people that are really talented…They look at other music and say oh yeah that something that was paid to have on the radio…So basically that’s what I did and then I got involved with Green Latern which is a whole other story…
S1: That’s actually what your getting ready to release now “Third World” it’s coming soon…What can catz expect?
IT: I recently finished the album you know I was distracted by a lot of other things and you know, that’s not always the best way to be but I was so focused and entrenched to finish this alum, that’s all I was doing, I shut my phone off…So I put together this album The 3rd World where I talk about the relationship that super powers and 1st world have with the 3rd world to the way that commercial rap and the industry have with the underground which is the 3rd world…Cause everybody you see on TV and MTV whether it’s Jay Z or Puffy and Nelly were all underground at some point, they had to step to the majors or the majors had to step to them and were sort of successful on their own and really it’s funny because as much as people think that the east coast is resentful of the south but I see their hustle as much more underground then what I see going on the east coast right now where everyone expects and tries to hustle a few thousand mixtapes and then get a record deal where other brothers were like whatever man I’m gonna keep getting this money and I have always embraced that attitude man and it’s funny because I get along with a lot of down south rappers and we don’t even rhyme about the same thing…That’s what we do we are here to hustle for the long run, this is much more then just about a quick flash in the pan, we are making music that we want to last for generations to come, we talking about subjects that affect not only the black and latino community but the world community, you know what I mean…
S1: Absolutely, absolutely…Now within your message there is a lot of political views that your putting out there, just talk to us about what you think about the current Bush administration and not what would be best for America as a whole but I’m saying with these elections coming up, just what you feel and what we should be looking out for as individuals in this beautiful land of America?
IT: LOL…Well I think that the public has some really important decisions to make about the future of this country and it also needs to realize that if democracy that we hold dear, if this ideal of we the people is really true then it can’t just be expressed in voting 25 times every 100 hundred years, you know what I mean, because then we are democracy in name only…The institution that make up the very fabric of our federal republic are what guarantee our democracy and I think that we get too lost in the fact that there are different people who come to us with ideals about what they want to change about the country yet they are not really changing the direction that we are moving in…They are just changing the way it is presented to the world and I feel like there are certain people in the Republican party that are very, very staunchly Republican because the past, there are people that Democrats that are staunchly Democrats because of the past and on both sides there is some confusion, because there is a Democratic party that 90% of the time are all African-America vote Democratic, then here they have a dude that’s willing to rock with them but then you have the Clinton’s that are like, hold on homie can’t you just wait your turn and dude is like nah I don’t wanna wait my turn…So it almost seems like he’s either put there or she’s there to screw him up or he there, people going back and forth about who’s doing what to who and at the same time your losing site of a much greater vision…Then there’s the Republicans and they have their bases, they have their Christian base of people that are like you know abortion is murder, but if were killing 200,000 Iraqi people to bring freedom to people that alright, those are acceptable casualties, those are unfortunately as they see it collateral damage…I think that a lot of times people get confused about what they’ve done, you know…Black people say, hey we got the right to vote under a Democrat, we got our right civil rights under a Democrat and then you got people down in Miami for example that say well we got harder laws against Castro under Republicans...,
IT:...we have a failed invasion under Kennedy and I think that really the embargo hasn’t done anything to anybody except them embittered people that are mad because someone else is living in their mansion, while they live in their mansion in Miami…They need to understand that no matter what the embargo is, just like the Berlin wall yo it’s always the older people that keep things the same and it’s the younger people that are saying, you know what this isn’t affecting anybody but the poor people, it’s not that your anti-Castro you anti-Cuban, you don’t like your own people because that’s what they choose…Right now they can say listen let’s choose what we have now and between American Democracy, you know Cubans in Cuba say? Oh you mean like America brought to Iraq? They don’t want that type of Democracy, you can keep that shit…And at the same time la revolucion is not perfect there are a lot of things wrong with it, I can’t tell nobody in the Cuban community that the system works 100%...You know if my father was doing life here in America you can’t convince me that the justice system is fair here but if somebody is in prison for 20 years out just for expressing their political views then obviously there’s a fundamental problem with that but we have to analyze why that problem came about, why the reaction and ideology was there that nationalized everything…We have to talk about the corruption of the past we can’t pretend that everything is fine, we can’t pretend that all of Latin America is a great democracy that lived under the control of the people…No…It was also white people who spoke Spanish with a Spanish background from Spain that dominated traditionally the black and indigenous people for years, and years, and years after we even got our quote un quote independence and we were always told that socialism, that’s the enemy and democracy is freedom and the free market and I’m always thinking like really? The free market is the freedom for you people to take whatever you want from country, exploit our natural resources and you only give us a little piece of whatever’s left…Now I’m sure economist from the right wing that are staunchly set in their ways, old people that don’t see the world no other way and will never see the world the other way and their gonna die bitter and fucked up like that which I feel very sorry for I understand…But that’s never the way their gonna see it they always find some way to spin it around…
S1: You have just encountered some real talk from my boy Immortal Technique, as you can see he has a lot on his chest…Listen man we living in some serious times yo and you need to pay some attention…Immortal again the album The 3rd World coming out soon, whose gonna be on it with you? When can we expect it to drop?
IT: It’s gonna come out this summer and I got my man Chino XL on there from the west coast, I got Crooked Eye, Psycho Realm, I got my peoples from Stronghold, Poison Pen, Sway, my brothers from around the way I got people singing on there too…I brought a lot of different feels, different things, different tones and different type of feeling for the music in the way I would spit on a track you know what I mean so it’s not just straight forward…Vol. 2 is great album but at the same time a lot of the music is just straight attacking just for looks, I wanted to attack the feeling of what I was trying to say as well, I wanted to be more diversified…
S1: Any last words of advice?
IT: I mean I’m just gonna tell people if they don’t know history then they are going to be doomed to repeat it and a lot of us don’t have a very good understanding of where were going and I think we need a better understanding. It’s up to us to change things, people who screwed up our community isn’t going to come in and change it ourselves and there’s not just one answer, you know what I mean…It’s not like democracy is the only solution, or Islam, or hip hop or communism or whatever you think is the solution it’s not just one of them it’s a lot of them that are put together that are molded like the metals that you have in making a good sword…We can’t expect to conquer with just one thing…I’ve seen a lot of different communities on tour and I’m going to be on tour this summer with Rock The Bells, I got my own tour…But the reality is that the music is a small part of a larger movement, it’s just so much bigger then just what people put on record, it has to be, because revolution is not just music…Revolution is action…
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S1 REal Talk Commentary
Yeah, it's you boy S1. Normally I don't take time to add to an interview that's already been finished, however speaking with Immortal Technique helped me understand it truly is "bigger than Hip Hop"... I mean, I always knew it was, but Tech helped me see it in a Global Context. Believe it or not, with the Right People... Hip Hop can truly change the World. Infact, it already has. Tech told me one more thing before we ended our interview. At first it bugged me out, but then I realized Homeboy's right on point. As we were finishing up Immortal Technique expressed that all MC's, Rappers, Lyricist's... that didn't agree with his point of view or way of delivering his message, should feel free to e-mail him, comment him, call him, text him, whatever... He much rather have a talk with you, than having to run up on you with the 44 and put a whole in your chest...
"If you call him, I suggest don't piss him off", S1.
Grafx by Nemisis
Legacymag.Net Exclusive
Interviewed by S1 for Legacy Magazine
LegacyMag.Net
Nothing But the Best!!!! That'z our WERD!!!!!
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