Social Activism in Hip-Hop -— -New -York’s ReadNex Poetry Squad
By Peter Aaron

Compton. Brooklyn. Detroit. Hotlanta. Philly. All undisputed hard-hitting hotbeds of rap and hip hop. But upstate New York?

“It’s definitely happening up here, even though it doesn’t get heard as much,” says Decora of Hudson Valley-based rap and spoken-word crew ReadNex Poetry Squad. “There’s an extreme amount of creativity.
and talent in places like Newburgh, Albany, Watertown. But up here it’s not [densely populated] like it is in the big cities, people are just more spread out.”

In fact, the grad student-dominated group—male MCs Decora, Cuttz El Colombiano, and Latin Translator,
lady rapper FreeFlowin, all 24, and male DJ H20, 21—is itself a geographically dispersed entity: All of the guys live in either New Paltz or Newburgh, while FreeFlowin resides in Brooklyn. But throughout its seven-year history, mere physical distance has never kept the band from its chosen role as a message-bringing, social-activist juggernaut.

Decora, Cuttz, Latin, and FreeFlowin met as students at Middletown’s Orange County Community College in 2001. “A couple of us were part of a community outreach program that did things like organize basketball
tournaments and field trips for students, stuff like that,” Decora recalls. “We also ran an open-mic night on campus, which Latin used to host, and it was really popular. The four of us all used to hit that all of the time and we were all really into poetry and hip hop, and we all wanted to use those things to work on social change. So we said, ‘We should start a group.’”

The ReadNex released their first CD, F.O.S.S.L., on the band’s own Debefore Records label in 2003, and took their high-energy live show to stages in the Hudson Valley and New York City. Eventually, they landed spots on HBO Latino, mtvU, and the Black Family Channel’s “Literary Living,” and shared the bandstand with icons like Saul Williams, The Last Poets, Patti LaBelle. But they also did something extremely uncommon for a group of self-funded hip hop artists: They hit the road, touring not just across the US, but overseas as well, in both Europe and the UK. “We’ve been to England twice, and the reaction there was really good,” says Decora. “Germany was really good, too. And so was France, which, believe it or not, is the biggest market outside the US for rap music. Spain was cool because a few of us also speak and rap in Spanish, and so the audiences there were very into that.”

The group dropped its second disc, Social ISsUe (also on Debefore), in late 2006, and the album started to blow up almost immediately, selling over 200 copies its first week out. In addition to the record’s fine beats and sharp production by Middletown mixmaster Graham, Social ISsUe’s success lays in its universal messages.Which makes perfect sense when you learn that when writing the rhymes that went into its creation, the band members interviewed more than 100 people of varying cultural backgrounds, genders, and localities about which issues were affecting them most. The results? Biting, thought-provoking word-bombs like Latin Translator’s “We Came from Queens,” which attacks male society’s mistreatment of women and how it relates to dissolution of the family unit, and Free-Flowin’s “Ms. Education of Bling,” which takes aim at rappers who all too readily sell out the revolutionary legacy of Martin Luther King and other forefathers for quick cash and glamour.

While the four MCs have worked with other DJs in the past, H20 is a recent addition. “He was a regular at our open mics, but none of us had ever really talked to him,” says Decora. “At the release party for the new CD, he came up to us and said, ‘I’m a DJ.’ We were like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’ It was perfect timing, because even though we use a live band for some of our shows, we were also looking for a DJ that could commit.”

From inception the ReadNex Poetry Squad has been an outfit that truly puts its money where its microphone is, and, for all of its members, setting a positive example via community outreach work has been as—if not more—important than the music they make. The sheer volume of laudable grassroots social-relief efforts the band has been involved in is simply staggering: Its regular “Monthly Campaigns” to help raise awareness of important issues have included a Thanksgiving food drive, a clothing drive for victims of Hurricane Katrina (the group even drove the collected items down to New Orleans in a rented truck,) a James Brown memorial charity concert in Newburgh, and numerous other advocacy programs. The quintet is even sponsoring a protégé named Liberty, an 18-year-old aspiring poet and rapper. “He was having problems at home and with money and wasn’t mentally available in the classroom, so he was in a school for troubled youths,” Decora explains. “Since we’ve been working with him, he’s doing much better now. He’s in a private school, where he’s moved to the top part of his class.”

But on top of all of the above is the group’s flagship outreach endeavor, its highly successful Nex to Read after-school program. Drawing on the group’s love of poetry, the effort currently helps more than 130 young students in the Newburgh school system express their feelings through the written and spoken word. And on the heels of Nex to Read has come yet another school workshop, “Hip Hop and Poetry Saved My Life,” which the group recently presented to a conference of over 600 educators of the New York State 21st Century Schools program in Albany.

“What [the band’s members] are doing is phenomenal,” says Felicia Watson of the New York State Center for School Safety, who has worked with the group on getting its concepts into area schools. “Using hip hop culture, it sends a powerful message to kids of all backgrounds. It’s education and performance, together.”

It’s certainly hard to square the music and philosophy of activist-artists like the ReadNex Poetry Squad with the bling-flinging, gun-toting gangsta stereotypes many identify with the hip hop milieu. “Well, that’s all those are, stereotypes,” Decora observes. “Like with food. McDonald’s isn’t real food, but that’s what gets put in front of most people so that’s what they end up eating. Everyone has hip hop inside of them, they just don’t all know it.”