Hip Hop Lines Up for Marvin X Benefit

Hip Hop Lines Up for Marvin X Benefit

Rapper Young Nia will perform at the Benefit for Marvin X's Black Bird Press, celebrating the release of his latest book The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Parables and Fables, 2010, 309 pages,
$100.00.

Young Nia is daughter of Bay Area rap living legend Askari X. She is featured on the CD Tha Grand Entrance, a compilation featuring original tracks by the beats, rhymes & life youth.

The benefit is Saturday, May 15, 2pm, at the African American Museum Library, 14th and Martin Luther King, Jr., downtown Oakland. The book is $100.00 but the event is free (give what you can).

We will be honored with another daughter in the black arts, Timothy Reed, novelist. She is novelist, poet, professor Ishmael Reed's daughter.
Also, Mechelle LaChaux's rapper child, Myelleamzi Johnson, aka Kiwi.
She will read Parable of the Madpoet.
















Malcolm Shabazz Hoover, poet/educator, son of activist/educator Mary Hoover.
His selection is Parable of the A Students.

Hip Hop and Literary Critic James G. Spady on Marvin X

Brace yourself and listen to this master narrator tell his story. Bold, callous, calculating, cultivating, coniving but always deeply poetic. Marvin X drives us through the depths of a hell so chilling as to leave the reader in a deep freeze. When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E. 40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express Black male urban experiences in a lyrical way.

We are talking about the existential experiences of Black men in the era following the departure of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and before Tupac's exile.

We enter the millennium fully cognizant of the possibilities but ever mindful of the colonized terrain we exist in daily. Marvin X...illuminates the necessary tensions between residual and emerging orders. He also provides insight into fluid identities shaped in this space and time.
--James G. Spady, Philadelphia New Observer, December, 1999



Hip Hop entrepreneur, filmmaker (Hip Hop the New World Order)
Muhammida El Muhajir (Marvin X's daughter) confers with Mary J. Blige