Soulfege: Take back the Mic

Most of you will remember Derrick Ashong, the young musician and activist whose spirited defence of Barack Obama caused a YouTube sensation earlier this year.

He's since gone on to write an Op Ed for CNN on Obama's race speech which became the number one most emailed piece on the site:

I watched in a state of minor shock, not so much at the deftness with which he defused the sophomoric conflation of his call for national unity with the inflammatory rhetoric of the retired head pastor of his church -- a conflation that would imply that we must each swallow whole the entirety of views expressed by our friends and associates.

It was not his repudiation of small thinking that struck me. It was the fact that here we had an American politician speaking with both candor and compassion about the proverbial elephant in our national living room.

Well now he's teamed up with two of his former Harvard buddies to form, Soulfege, of which The Boston Globe have said, "Its members realized they had the platform to reach ears not only with their music - a fusion of thumping African music and rhythms, sweet reggae breezes, funk, and hip-hop - but also with their message."

And it's the message which makes Soulfege so different.

Six years ago, while visiting Ghana, musician Derrick N. Ashong heard a Ghanaian man use the n-word.

"The American hip-hop scene had not only made it acceptable but had also made it cool," says Ashong, who is a member of the Boston-bred band Soulfege. "[That man's] whole experience of African-America was its MTV and BET videos, music, artists, and movies, so how would he know about racism? How would he know about [US] poverty? How would he know about unemployment?"

The encounter planted a seed in Ashong's mind. Hip-hop, he felt, was teaching Africans that African-Americans were rich and violent; the US media, conversely, was teaching Americans that Africans were poor and helpless. His band was in a position to help change misperceptions on both sides.

I've been lucky enough to listen to their new album which I thought was brilliant and I especially love their message that the US doesn't need another four years of Bush as expressed in their song, "Beating Around the Bush", which you can download for free from their website.

It’s hard to sell lies
To those who question

So keep ‘em dumb
We’ll march to that rhythmless drum
Tell the world that their blind
To the crime we’ve become
And in one line profess
That the war has been won
Pin a flag to your chest
As you offer your sons…

Stop beatin’ around the Bush.

On July 15th they released the digital version of their new record "Take Back the Mic."

You can get your copy here.

Tags: Soulfege, Derrick Ashong