BrainRaps? What's that?

    Whasup? This here is Brain Raps. It's a website that promotes hip hop with a positive thrust to it. It isn't about being against any certain kind of music but its about being FOR the kind of music that is for the people. Music that talks about what's really going on the streets rather than some damaging illusion or shuck-n-jive misrepresentation of what the people of the hip hop community are really like. Brain Raps prefer to sell a message rather than a product and that message is about helping the listener realize what's going on in the world today, or even better, helping the listener figure out what to do about it.

    I made this site a little more than a year ago. It has been growing slowly but steadily. It is mainly a place for people to stop in and talk about the Brain Raps artists that they like, but it is also slowly becoming a place to come to to listen to some music, find lyrics, see some art and find new news on the artists.

    I'm very open to suggestions. A lot of the features on Brain Raps have come from the suggestions of visitors to the site. We don't mind at all if you are here to promote some conscious artists, known or unknown, but please contribute to some other discussions too. Don't just spam us and leave. Thanks.

    -Green Earth Al

So..um... Who are you?

    Me? I'm just some guy. I'm old enough to remember the day my freind Shad brought me in his house to listen to the record "Rapper's Delight" by the sugar hill gang. We didn't realize that we were listening to Rap Music we just knew it was something very different and very fun to listen to. We listened to it every day and memorized all the words and then learned not to say them in front of our parents.

    I moved out of the hood a year later and ran with a different kind of crowd and listened to a different kind of music, but when Run DMC broke through in the early 80s hip hop managed to find me and bring me back to who I was a bit. When the Break Dance explosion happened I was all up in it. I had the parachute pants and the studded bracelets and the bandanas and all that. I even had the French Foreign Legion type had that dude was wearing in the Breakin movie. Yeah, I was all up in it.

    I listened to everything in the 80s. Whatever was popular. Didn't much care what it was. Until I started college. My freshman year at the dorms there was a kid across the hall from me that woke the whole floor up every single morning with Public Enemy. He liked Public Enemy and BDP and he could listen to it over and over and never get tired of it. I started to wonder what it was about that music that he could keep listening to the same thing. I used to get tired of my music after a while, but not him. I left the dorms that summer without ever figuring it out.

    Then a freind of mine came back from California sometime within the next year or so. We were catching up on what our interest were because we had always liked the same things. In music though he had gone exclusively to hip hop. In Buffalo there was a hip hop show on college radio one day a week but that was about all the exposure I was getting. He was telling me that I had to start listening to Public Enemy and N.W.A. Well I was glad that I could at least say I knew what Public Enemy was but I had never heard of N.W.A. So we went over to the record store and picked some up and I was listening to Public Enemy and N.W.A. and Easy E's tape non stop. Over time N.W.A. lost its appeal for me, but Public Enemy really changed the course of my life. I think between Check D of Public Enemy and Spike Lee and his movies I am a radically different person from who I would have become. A few years later I was hunting down anything that sounded anything like P.E. to me. I became interested in Brand Nubian and Paris and K.M.D, Poor Righteous Teachers, X-Clan, King Sun, Lakim Shabazz, Disposable Heroes and Arrested Development. All of it. It is the music that has shaped my life. So I made this websites in the hopes that I could give back to it in some small way.