Dorm Room Griots
Flow From Above
Get the CD from RadCakes

"People used to make records,
as in a record of an event,
the event of people playing music in a room. 
Now everything is cross-marketing,
it's about sunglasses and shoes,
or guns and drugs, you choose"
                              Ani DiFranco

Most of this album was recorded in our Boston College dormroom on a sketchy microphone.  Whatever sound quality we sacrificed was worth being able to have fun and waste time experimenting.  This album is the product of putting talented poets, artists and musicians together in a room  and letting flow come down naturally from above.

Issues of global justice and the role of decommodified art in a capitalist system are explored alongside discussions of sexuality, racism, and a sense of home. On "We Have Forgotten," Myran Hunter speaks about the African musical and social history that hip-hop has sold out. "You can purchase an alternate ego, a lavish lifestyle, worldwide recognition, or even a whole new identity. All of this can be yours for three easy payments of your past, your present, and your future," Hunter says.

Historically, griots have been both men and women, but hip-hop refuses to pass the mic to females. On "Moonbeams," Martine Russell sings her ode to the urban village, the "birth-mother to b-boys and b-girls." Her poem celebrates the persistence of a battered, but not beaten, metropolis, "survivor of Nixon and drug wars / all the while she continues to smile."

Flow From Above is full of information you never learned in high school American history. "It's no wonder to which demographic democracy reaches / it's been since Woodrow Wilson when a president wrote his own speeches," speaks Sean Dwyer, aka Gnotes. West African griots served for centuries as keepers of memories. Griots are oral storytellers who use poetry and music to teach their village about its history. In America, griots became rappers, but somewhere between Senegal and the South Bronx, these rappers forgot the history they were entrusted to protect. The Dorm Room Griots formed in order to help fill this void in their community.