A$AP Rocky attended the premiere of Tariq Nasheed’s documentary Microphone Check: The Hidden History of Hip-Hop over Memorial Day Weekend. Nasheed touted his film as dispelling the myths of Hip-Hop’s origins.
AllHipHop’s Chuck Creekmur spoke with Nasheed to discuss controversial aspects of the documentary, which disputes Latinos’ role in Hip-Hop’s creation. Nasheed, a leading voice of the Foundational Black Americans movement, believed there was a corporate-led effort to rewrite Hip-Hop’s history.
“In the last 15 years, there’s been this push by the corporate media to say that Hip-Hop was started by Blacks and Latinos,” Nasheed said. “And they’ve been pushing that narrative real hard. And that’s just not true. Not taking anything away from the Latino brothers and sisters, but they came later. And they did phenomenal things. But in the early stages of Hip-Hop, all the pioneers have said this: ‘We was just out there by ourselves. We were doing it by ourselves.’ And the Latino cats were the first students.”
He continued, “We gotta be very careful with people doing that ‘we co-created something together’ because what I’ve seen, people try to ease over and say, ‘Well, the Latinos actually started it first and then we started learning from them.’ And that’s where it gets dangerous because then we’re gonna end up in the same realm we were in with country music.”
Shout out to A$AP Rocky, Debbie D, and everyone who came out to support the special Memorial Day weekend screenings of our new film #MicrophoneCheck . Every city where the screening premiered was lit. The screening were so successful we are going to have another weeklong… pic.twitter.com/H464WaIpuA
— Tariq Nasheed 🇺🇸 (@tariqnasheed) May 28, 2024
Microphone Check features interviews with Hip-Hop pioneers Grandmaster Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, Busy Bee, Sha-Rock, MC Debbie D, Coke La Rock, DJ Hollywood and more. Nasheed could not interview two of Hip-Hop’s most well-known pioneers: DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash.
Nasheed, an internet personality accused of peddling conspiracy theories, claimed he tried to interview Latinos for Microphone Check. He believed no Latinos spoke to him because there’s no proof they contributed to the birth of Hip-Hop.
“It shouldn’t be so hard to give credit to Black people for creating something,” Nasheed said. “When Hip-Hop was negative, we got all the credit. When it was looked at as violent and degenerate, oh [it’s] Blacks. Now that it’s a corporate thing, it’s going to the Olympics, well, other people contributed … If we let them, they’ll say everybody created it. So, we have to put our foot down and say, ‘Look, This is what it is. This is the definitive narrative of the story and we’re gonna leave it at that.’”
Check out AllHipHop’s interview with Nasheed below.
