Chuck D has taken on two official roles to help develop Major League Baseball’s chemistry with Hip Hop culture.
The 63-year-old rap veteran has been assisting the MLB in its year-long celebration of Hip Hop’s 50th anniversary. On Thursday (August 10), the organization announced that the Public Enemy founding member has been named Music Ambassador and Content Architect for their upcoming events.
AD LOADING...
This will begin with the Hip Hop 50 Live at Yankee Stadium concert scheduled to take place on Friday (August 11), which Public Enemy will serve as special correspondents for. Furthermore, the “Fight the Power” MC will get more involved in the league’s content, music and stories with an emphasis on Hip Hop.
“As a longtime baseball fanatic, I am beyond honored to be the first Hip Hop artist to work with Major League Baseball in this exciting new way – connecting sound and culture to the stories of the game,” he said. “Thank you to MLB for adding me to the lineup…and the pitch is on the way.”
Chuck D has one of the most distinct and authoritative voices in Hip Hop, and now he’s been tapped to narrate a new Audible series called Can You Dig It? A Hip Hop Origin Story. The five-part Amazon series explores the inception of the most profitable music genre in the world during the 1970s in the Bronx.
“December 8, 1971, was a defining moment in American history,” the Public Enemy legend says at the opening of the show’s trailer. “A time when the gangs of New York laid down their weapons and redirected their youthful energy towards the creative arts. Arts that would eventually become the foundation of what we now know as Hip Hop.”
The show itself centers around how the murder of Ghetto Brothers gang member and peacekeeper Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin led to gang members choosing to settle their differences peacefully through the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, which led to the birth of Hip Hop after Kool Herc’s legendary Back to School party in 1973.
Angelique Lenox, who’s the niece of Cornell Benjamin, said in a statement that she feels as though her uncle deserves to be mentioned alongside Kool Herc in Hip Hop history especially during its 50th anniversary.
AD LOADING...
“If Kool Herc is considered the father of Hip Hop, then my uncle was the general; my uncle was the martyr,” Lenox said. “He didn’t die in vain, something good came from his death; his life mattered. This is truly my best version of a love letter to my father and my family and I will not stop until his name is a part of the Hip Hop story.”
Influential figures at the time, such as former Black Panther and peacekeeper Joseph Mpa, original Hip Hop MC Coke La Rock and renowned photographer-documentarians Joe Conzo and Henry Chalfant will provide historical accounts of the conditions that led to the birth of the storied art form.
AD LOADING...
The titles of each episode in the series are (in chronological order: “The Bronx is Burning,” “Old Enough to Die,” “The Three Trash Cans,” “Imagine” and “From Hopeless to Hopeful.”
The series will be released on Thursday (August 10).
