Proper Propaganda: Information Age by Dead Prez
by Martin Mudd
North of Center
...
The album’s concept speaks to the technological reality in which we find ourselves today. The intro track opens with a female-sounding computerized voice saying, “Uploading: Information Age.” The suspense builds as the futuristic auditory progress bar bleeds into the album’s first song, “A New Beginning.” The same female voice will end the album with an announcement that you are “Downloading.” The theme of digital upload/download works, I think, on two levels. First, it is a winking acknowledgement to the reality of the recording industry today: many of the people listening will have obtained the music, as I did, by downloading it for free on the Internet. Second, it is a not-so-subtle reminder that dead prez are uploading this album, full of practical, political and spiritual knowledge, into your brain. After you are finished listening/uploading, the idea is to download the knowledge to friends and comrades. The act completes the cycle of participatory education mentioned so often in dead prez lyrics: “each one teach one.” dead prez don’t really care about the “illegal” download—they want the knowledge to spread.
Before it recites a laundry list of the systemic problems staring this society in the face, the album’s first song, “A New Beginning,” dead prez reveal who they know to be at least part of their audience. “Try to save the trees / but you can’t go green / without that black and red / if we gon get free / we got to change that light bulb in our head.” They are reaching out to speak to young middle-class people across the nation who acknowledge the global ecological collapse we face, but who also, perhaps seeing the failure of the bullshit “go green” consumerist approach, are frozen in fear of the impending “end of the world.” But as the dead prez lyrically emphasize, we can choose to see collapse, the decay of the American empire, not as “the end of the world,” but instead as a “new beginning,” a perspective that more easily resonates with oppressed people who have been surviving the system all along: “They dollar’s losing value/ but the hood knew that already.” It is a cutting but hopeful sentiment, echoed later in the cut “Take Me To The Future,” that another world is possible which we must fearlessly build together: “Change is so necessary / cuz they system is not workin.”
This is not to say that dead prez optimism overrides the problems of the present. “What If The Lights Go Out,” for example, is eerily prescient of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. It begins with a scene of two men stranded (on a rooftop?) as a helicopter passes overhead and one yells in vain hope of being rescued. The other man says “don’t do that man / you gon get shot … they aint comin to help us man / we got to help our motherfuckin self.” In comes stic.man, telling us how to do just that—to be ready for whatever: storms, financial collapse, power outages, martial law. (As I write, there are some still without power in Red Hook, NY, more than a month after Superstorm Sandy.) He tells us what to truly value: “organization, communication / clarity family solidarity,” adding, “The dollar bill is just a piece of paper / when the lights go out it aint gon save you.” A jab, perhaps, not only at the petit bourgeois chasers of the “American Dream,” but also the bling-bling money-worshiping rappers DP have regularly called out in past songs like “Hip Hop” and “Malcolm Garvey Huey.” In this song and a few others, M-1 brings an old-school hip hop sound to his raps, reminiscent of Grandmaster Flash in “The Message,” that grounds the electronic sounds in a hip-hop tradition. “This organized humanity / is borderline insanity, but / don’t panic, be cool / no code to the streets and no rules.”
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