@ Sea With Justin Mcroberts

My guest on this episode of the podcast is hip hop artist Propaganda. I have a somewhat poignant recollection of my fist real experience with hip-hop. On April 18, 1992, I was standing in the outfield of the Oakland Coliseum with thousands of other people like me.  It was about 1 hr before Bono and U2 took the stage for a Bay Area stop of the Zoo tour and on the mic was an MC named Chuck D,. He was pacing the stage, delivering powerful, poetic lines with an authority and a focus I quite honestly hadn’t seen before in an artist … and have rarely experienced since. Chuck D was (and is) a singular performer and lyricist. But as much as I was being swept up by the brilliance of Public Enemy… what I was primarily experiencing was the full force of hip hop. I was invited into a narrative and a narrative form with which I was mostly unfamiliar… but one that would eventually take a prominent place in the center of public life and dialogue. I can’t think of a popular art form as broadly accessible while being so polit