When I was at the Kennedy School years ago I co-founded a non-profit with Barry Malin that focused on health issues among Latin American street kids called Shine a Light. Our focus in those early days was controlling certain addictive adhesives (usually used in shoes) that street kids would abuse as inhalants.
It's amazing how much progress has been achieved since those early days, attributable almost entirely to our incredible Executive Director, Kurt Shaw. Kurt has built Shine a Light into one of the richest networks of programs focused on street kids in the world.
We've had some amazing fellows over the years who have done some very cool projects, but I just wanted to highlight one of the current projects called City of Rhyme, which has released some tracks written and recorded by street rappers living in the Favelas in Recife, Brazil. The tracks are available on the Shine a Light website as mp3 files under a Creative Commons license, and I've been listening to them non-stop for the past few days. They really rock!I strongly encourage you to visit the site and listen to some of the tracks, or to download them to your mp3 player or burn a CD. It's really good stuff, even if you don't speak much Portuguese.
Here's some of what Kurt wrote about the project (more is available on the Shine a Light website):
"I've never seen street kids pour over texts in the same way that they did as they wrote their raps, spending hours and hours writing and rewriting, consulting with each other about a rhyme here or there, trying to figure out the metrification (with another local rapper teaching about the difference between iambic pentameter and quadrameter, the decasílaba...). Then doing research about their neighborhoods, about the history of the city, about race... Three kids also helped to compose the music on the computer, which DJ Big used as a way to teach everything from math (four beats in a measure, four sixteenth notes in a beat, pitch and frequency...) to computer science (all the composing and recording was on the computer). And all of this in an improvised studio in the favela!
The concert... it's hard to get my mind around it, really. It was in a huge colonial plaza in front of a portuguese church, where the brightly painted houses around the square have all been turned into sidewalk restaurants -- the city government put up a huge stage and sound system, and bands come and play almost every night. I got there early to have a bit of dinner, but the rappers arrived before the food, so we shared everything and tried to calm their nerves ("No, I can't eat, I'd just throw it up!"). A couple of the rappers were also part of the video group I had been running, so they took advantage of the time to interview each other and to film the growing crowd.
...
Ocado, the first rapper, had also been the most nervous during the rehearsals, the least confident in his own lyrics, but he exploded into the song "Living in the favela ain't easy", an autobiografical piece about the everyday violence and discrimination he'd suffered for all of his 14 years, the way that society makes him invisible, the gangs try to recruit him -- and then make fun of him for not picking up a gun to make money -- but at the same time, the way he uses breakdance and capoeira to escape that, to find respect... All of the other rappers -- singing backup -- joined in on the chorus, and by the end of the song, so did the whole crowd, which had now grown to fill the entire plaza. My guess is about 3000 voices rapping "Living in the favela ain't easy", but it's hard to estimate. What's certain is that the parents sang along, but also middle class university students, intellectuals, kids from other favelas, street kids sniffing glue in front of the stage...
Over the next forty minutes, all of the kids performed their own raps -- Bruno, the intellectual meditating on the death of his friends who had entered gangs; Aquiles mixing traditional music with hip-hop to sing about regional culture; eleven year old Eliene reciting a poem trying to define childhood; Vilma, six months pregnant, condemning domestic violence; little Ítalo, with a child's voice in spite of his 14 years, dressed in a huge winter jacket in spite of the 90 degree air; Rodrigo combining a beat box with an african drum; an invitation to all of the breakdancers to come up and dance to a song that a couple of the kids had composed...
The applause was great, the mothers cried, DJ Big finally relaxed... but the most amazing thing is this: a couple of days later, I went to the Brasilian Social Forum, where a couple of the same kids were going to give a breakdancing workshop to the left wing activists who attend such events. As everything was warming up, DJ Big put Ocado's "Living in the Favela Ain't Easy" on the sound system. People tapped their feet, passers-by stopped... but most amazing of all, some black kids whom I had never seen before stood in the back of the crowd, singing every word. Not just the chorus: every word. Within three days of the concert, a fourteen year old kid's lyrics had become something that people memorize, use to understand their own lives..."