This one is here to remember Malcolm X on his birthday in the year 2007. “MX” was written as rhythm rhyme lyrics for a hip hop album that was never released. For more details about my adolescent adventures, do read “rasx() Screenshots: Freestyle—The Art of Rhyme.”

The teenaged idea behind writing this rhyme was to respond to a very peculiar time in entertainment history when it was actually considered cliché to have a Malcolm X sound sample in your popular music. There were so many young, self-described rappers and music producers who went through the motions of using a Malcolm X speech but few wrote about Malcolm X. It was my seventeen-year-old task to fill the gap—and I expected to be rewarded for it by other Black people—in Los Angeles!

Oh, how innocent I was…