The Oxhorn Music Mix

The First Annual Hip Hop & Peacebuilding Festival is the brainchild of Stacy Willyard, is a George Mason University grad student at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. The event is designed to bring together artists, diplomats, intellectuals & peacemakers from the US, Africa & the Middle East to increase understanding and awareness of political and social turmoil. The conference will focus on the role hip hop can play in empowering youth to speak out, organize and act to secure more peaceful future outcomes.

This conference represents everything good and awesome about this music. Hip Hop is a powerful art form and as such it has an incredible, if seldom recognized/realized, potential to be used for good. The medium can provide its practitioners an engaging forum to speak out about issues of real importance. And people listen. Whether or not the general populous is aware of this, real heads know it as truth.Consciously and conscientiously practiced Hip Hop is a positive influence on the communities in which it grows and provides otherwise disenfranchised youth with the means to affect real change on local and international levels. Hip Hop gives voice, gives direction, gives community, gives identity, gives understanding. Despite its somewhat sordid history, this art form can play an important role in peacemaking processes worldwide.The DC Hip Hop and Peacebuilding Festival represents the culmination of Stacy’s work with other GMU students, DC artists, and other foreign and domestic music groups to create a festival to promote co-existence and dialogue through Hip Hop. She is also a researcher at the United States Institute for Peace and is co-sponsoring the festival along with others such as Nomadic Wax, Rosetta Stoned, and Sol Productions, and GMU student group Project Nur. She deserves a hug, a handshake and a hardy round of applause.Word up.

Contact: transformationalart@gmail.com
Websitio: http://www.beats4peace.org/

Story by Ryn Burns

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Emcee/DJ/Producer/Musician/Artist Edan is a master of musical collage. His second LP, Beauty & The Beat is a rich psychedelic tapestry, punctuated with soundgems pilfered as readily from 60’s and 70’s rock & roll as from funk and rap. Combine this with blistering lyrical imagery steeped in hip hop history and a humorous, even humbling, dose of self aggrandizing and you have yourself one the best albums of 2005. Shedding the silliness that permeated earlier release Primitive Plus (which is still a damn good album), Edan comes into his own.

shoot my television walk out doors and explore
with the innocence of kids age four
I frolic in the sand with a colony of ants
my particles expand building oxygen in plants
from Rakim to Caz to Lakim Shabazz
illogically advanced with a knowledge of the past”Download Making Planets

Edan has associated himself with some of the rawest, most significant and established emcees and djs in the underground and in the biz at large. For example, check out his jam, Cut Chemist remix of Torture Chamber featuring Percee P.

In addition to time tested emcee, Beauty and the Beat features, Mr. Liff, Dagha and Insight.

Incorporating vintage pedals and digital effects keeps his show live, hitting hard on reverb and delays at key moments. Moving from the tables to the mic, to both at once is a feat few in the world can do well.

In addition to all that, dude does his own album art and has a singer/songwriter folk project on the side. Plus he’s environmentally conscious…“I don’t think human beings right now are doing too much to assess their relationship with nature, and just the natural ways of this world. Ultimately it’s about saving ourselves because once we cross that line the world will shit us out and revitalize and bloom once again as if we never even existed. It’s not really about save the earth as, respect the earth and save ourselves. And respect each other and love each other. And know that love is all we got here, and make most of our actions stem from that.”
- Grand GoodThe combination of all these seemingly disparate elements is Edan Portnoy, a hiphop jabberwok.

The artist receives an Oxhorn rating of “if you haven’t heard it, I will hunt your ears with a soundgun”

Check out Edan’s official page or his label Lewis Recordings.

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