Freestyle the Art of Rhyme (Screenshot 1)
Two women can be credited for starting the freestyle hip-hop school on the West Coast. One of the women, Ifa Sadé, is an ancestor. She is shown in the picture frame in the lower right hand corner of my Blog entry, “Two Stills from KRST Unity.” The other woman, B. Hall, is shown at left. Ifa Sadé was the principle partner of The Good Life Heath Food Restaurant with her husband Omar that housed the rappers one night per week throughout the 1990s. B. Hall was the organizer of the concept. B. Hall is literally the producer.
Beyond what was edited into this award-winning documentary is the fact that B. Hall is the mother of R/Kain Blaze, The Undefined. It was he who did the day-to-day groundwork that made the “The Good Life” open-mic’ happen. It was he who produced the underground magazine freestyle at the same time Urb and The Source were coming of age. The goal was to respect the freedom in “freestyle” and build a youth-owned media center based on the content produced out of The Good Life and the human traffic packed in each night. What happened was that most of the twenty-something talent kept it real, obeyed the laws of instant gratification and commerce and embraced those high-interest loans we call record deals as quickly as you can run out of a box of promotional stickers among the light poles of inner-city boulevards. To rewrite a line in Volume 10’s “Pistol Grip Pump,” Hang with the dogs, man. Forget the guerilla.
The Undefined, by the way, is interviewed here at kintespace.com where you may find it curious that this man is a seasoned filmmaker but it took someone else to make Freestyle—The Art of Rhyme. Simultaneously, I am having difficulty recalling that any of the gold-record-producing rappers coming out of The Good Life banding together to do a benefit concert for B. Hall, who is not by any stretch of the imagination a “wealthy” woman.
Most African-descended children, those of “the darker tone”—to quote one New Yorker in the film—are conditioned to survive into adulthood as disconnected, egocentric individuals. So when we see one of the rappers in the film screaming at the top of his lungs in the crowded parking lot of The Good Life “Let me get down!,” I can assure you that he is not thinking about the wellbeing of B. Hall, Ifa Sadé or R/Kain Blaze. Disrespect comes naturally—even subconsciously—for captives of the oppressor, as the Wicked Master is the role model. It takes a genuine-human effort to overcome the Imperial Conditioning and bring Black Africa.