Professor A.L.I.: Recent Episodes
Professor A.L.I.
Professor A.L.I. is an educator & M.C., who lives up to the quote that a Professor has knowledge and an M.C. has the audience.
His brand of Hip-Hop, marries the best of KRS-One, Paris, Dead Prez & the GZA to socio-political, spiritual, and environmental narratives.
He also teaches courses on Hip-Hop at Bay Area Independent Schools, U.C. Berkeley and College Preparatory programs.
I wrote and recorded “The Pen” to introduce my audience and students of Hip-Hop in general to the concept of the double entendre and coded language in our (Hip-Hop) culture, while at the same time provide them with a critique of ignorance, which I believe to be the antithesis of Hip-Hop, which is defined by our community as “intelligent movement”, because one must be “Hip” or “in the know” to understand it and “hop” or move in order to live it, and ignorance is unintelligent and unmoving, and as a Hip-Hop artist and cultivator of this culture, I see ignorance as a tangible prison that diminishes our humanity and snuffs out our light as potential learned beings of this universe.
“The Pen” is a piece that asks the listener to stand in-between a sense of hope and a cloud of cynicism, hinging on how one perceives the word “pen”; it can either be a writing instrument representing knowledge or a slang-abbreviation for penitentiary, which is a prison. So the pen respectively represents the freedom of speech on one hand, and on the other it is confinement to a cage, which hinders both movement and speech.
This is a free track that was made to bring awareness to Black Lives Matter and the current climate in the world regarding a disdain for minority lives.
XFactor explores the contributions of the teachings & legacy of Malcolm X upon Hip-Hop.
Express despite doubt, X Is a lighthouse/A threat to White house, so erased like whiteout/And Like shrouds, lost in Labyrinth, in Nazareth/And domes shattered by a battle with, an asterisk/Accidents? Mecca birthed Hip-Hop, X Factor this,/Seventeenth Chapter, imperative you master this/A sanctioned hit, scatters black consciousness/Re-assassinated; by Niki’s obnoxiousness/She’s an operative; of an toxic architect/Beyond congressmen; who else, targets X?/Blatant disrespect, of an X, bearing a rifle/A variable peepin’ threats, not American idol/He’s placenta to Hip-Hop’s birth; so discarded/Yet his knowledge provided nutrition for these artists/A martyr with no sequel, a falcon versus eagle/"Shahbazz" battling evil, Malcolm’s for the people,
When ebony was felony, X was facing enemies/Hegemony toppled, necessarily, by any means,/See an ex gangster, birthed the next chapter,/Any truth spit by rappers, it’s the x-factor
Extract the X-factor, expose they extravagance/Knowledge extracted; an exodus of Africans/Examples to expand, a black man excluded/Examine white expansion, is built on exclusion/X spit’s the truth, and explains the extinction/Of dark skinned men, is an express extension/Of exploration, Columbian Exchange, and extraction/Of resources, exposing explosive new facts/Like executive branch, executes George Jackson/While exhaust exfoliates, earthly expanses/Yet experts exaggerate, label X an Extremist/Express the X, his text, should have an Exegesis/From under Excrement; of lies they explicated/To exterminate X and replace it by explicit hate/That implicates X men, X’d out by yes-men/If you inherit the X, you’re next; Ex-pression