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Food, Clothes & Shelter gives the movement a makeover
Loading ...Atlanta’s independent hip-hop scene gets behind a sound revolution.
Twenty years ago this summer, when Public Enemy dropped “Fight the Power” — the wake-up call of an anthem laced with 400 years of black angst and pent-up aggression — Kalonji Jama Changa was sitting behind bars for engaging in illegal drug activity or, as he now refers to it, “selling plantation poison.”
Born into a family of activists, his misguided sense of rebellion led him astray as a teen, “almost like the preacher’s son,” says Changa, who still went by his birth name Nigel Korsnick Brown at the time. “I was like the white sheep of the family.”
Locked away in prison for nearly two years, Changa finally heard his calling.
“Everything my mother and father ever told me came to me all at once. It came to me when they talked about slavery. It came to me when they talked about the prison business. Everything just started popping in my head,” he recalls. “I could not believe that I was really running from myself.”
He runs in the opposite direction now, as founder and national coordinator of FTP Movement, the several-years-old community activist conglomerate with an exchangeable acronym: “For the people. Free the prisoners. Formulating the plan. Fuck the policies,” Changa says, rattling off the endless options. “We wanted something that was interchangeable for any given situation.”
When “fuck the police” is suggested, Changa laughs. “Usually, I don’t say that. We don’t want to appear to just be some mad, ranting, raving lunatics.”
Indeed, the movement is about 30 years overdue for a much needed makeover. And Changa, along with his burgeoning FTP Artist Collective, has set out to do just that with the mid-August release of an impressive cache of beats and rhymes. The double-CD compilation Food, Clothes & Shelter: The Street Album commemorates the 30-year anniversary of Black August — an annual display of solidarity with political prisoners throughout the nation. Besides a few featured stars, including Kanye West, Adam Levine (of Maroon 5) and KRS-ONE, most of the material on the CD is produced by local, unsigned talent. And it’s a far cry from the swagged-out, trap house trope that’s given Atlanta such a big, bad rap.
Just as Changa hopes the compilation will help popularize the plight of the oppressed, it could also serve as a calling card for Atlanta’s woefully overlooked independent hip-hop scene. And that would be just the sort of revolution the city needs, too.
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