From The Wire, to the Limit – The Story of the Baltimore Mixtape Project
That Baltimore's poor have been plagued by social problems will come as no surprise to most, as these problems have been chronicled in detail on the HBO series The Wire. Now, almost five years after the end of The Wire, these social problems not only persist, but have been exacerbated by chronic budget deficits and Black Baltimore being disproportionately hit by a great recession which, according to some estimates, has wiped out 50% of the accumulated Blacks nationwide, nearly 40 years of progress washed away in a little over 40 months.
Unfortunately, the increase in the visibility of Baltimore’s problems never materialized into an outpouring of material support, and thus one of Baltimore’s most needy populations, it's Black youth, continues to languish in broken neighborhoods, overcrowded and dangerous jails where 85% of inmates are African American, and schools, as segregated as the prisons, remain light on constructive activities and heavy on leaded water pipes.
Many watched, but few did anything to help after the credits rolled, and Baltimore's youth, already push into a corner, were pushed to the limit.
But a funny thing happened on the road to this story's seemingly inevitable tragic ending; Baltimore's youth began to push back. In basements and one mic concert halls, Baltimore's youth have used hip-hop in an attempt to articulate the conditions of their reality, to put their pain on paper, and thus, maybe, find strength to bear that reality.
The Baltimore Mixtape Project (BMP) is an attempt to build and channel this energy, creating a structure which incentives youth to use hip-hop as a tool to raise the social consciousness of themselves and their communities. A unique collection of
academics (Lester Spence- Johns Hopkins, Jared Ball, Morgan State) ,
community organizers (The Intersection),
political activist (Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle),
and nonprofit service organizations (The Baltimore Urban Debate League),
it seeks to create a space where individual youth can feel that their creative efforts are value by sponsoring contests where youth produce hip-hop and spoken word pieces around specific local political issues, and then compete for cash prizes at concerts which serve as a community showcases for youth artistic talent. After the concert, the work collected by the BMP will then we transferred to CDs and disseminated, for free, around the city as a political education tool, harkening back to classic cassette mixtape as a tool not only of artistic expression, but grassroots journalism.
The BMP operates under the assumption that, as opposed to demanding intellectual conformity and docility from youth, fostering creative and constitutive expression can allow youth to be the architects of their own education and liberation. The BMP is using kickstarter to ask you to support our efforts, specifically, to show Baltimore's youth that there are those out their who value their work enough to pay for it, as this kickstarter was created for the express purpose of raise the prize money for our first contest, asking students to produce work critiquing the “School-to-Prison-Pipeline”.
To find out more about the Baltimore Mixtape Project
To Donate to the Baltimore Mixtape Project
