Home » Music » Hip-Hop Music & Culture » Declaration of Independence: hip-hop manifesto

Declaration of Independence: hip-hop manifesto

© Steve Juon

We, the members of the hip-hop community worldwide, today and forevermore declare our rights as human beings under the eyes of whatever deity we choose to follow. These rights are:

* freedom of speech * unbiased media coverage of hip-hop * the right to assemble * the right to jam in public * the right to bass * the right to write * the right to tag/bomb * freedom to party and bullshit * the right to smoke cannabis * freedom from harassment * freedom from ignorance * freedom from the narrow-minded

We refuse to be held down. With the Mothership at our side and the funk in our stride, we are One Nation Under a Groove. London, Tokyo, Amsterdam, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Boston, Seattle, Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Helsinki, Hong Kong, all over the world we unite under the four elements:

* MC-ing (the verbal arts) * DJ-ing (the scratching arts) * b-boy (the dancing arts) * graf (the visual arts)

We will not be denied, our time is now. Hip-hop culture is twenty years strong and twenty centuries deep. Cab Calloway was a great MC. So was W.E.B. DuBois. So was Haile Selassie I. So was Moses. We are all poets scholars and philosophers. We're also people who like to get down and shake our groove thang now and then. We like to laugh at a good rhyme and cry over our fallen soldiers. Rest in peace to hip-hoppers who have fallen -- not just the big names but the unknown people victimized by racism, disinformation, miseducation, oppression, apartheid, slavery, war.

Our heart and soul bleeds for hip-hop but it also beats strong and firm as hip-hop. We encompass multitudes. We are life. And we dare you to deny us the basic rights of life, TO life, that anybody else has. This is our Declaration of Independence.

Peace, Flash

The copyright of the article Declaration of Independence: hip-hop manifesto in Hip-Hop Music & Culture is owned by Steve Juon. Permission to republish Declaration of Independence: hip-hop manifesto in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.