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January 17, 2016 8:08 PM   Subscribe

Sometimes, music is the best medicine.” Frank Waln is a 26-year-old Hip-Hop artist; a Sicangu Lakota person who grew up on the Rosebud Reservation, taught himself to play piano as a child, and mixes his own music in his basement studio.

There's no definite date announced yet, but Frank Waln will soon be releasing a full album sometime this year. For now, here's a selection of his great music:
White War

Oil4Blood (All Red Everything)

My Stone, YT with lyrics

AbOriginal

What Makes The Red Man Red, yes he flipped that Peter Pan song!

And a couple more articles about the artist:
Paper Magazine: One major element of hip-hop is that you can bring to it who you are. For me, it was a catalyst to reconnect to my own culture and own indigeneity and look at it from a non-colonial lens. It was a safe space to look at who I was as a Lakota person.

The FADER: I'm trying to give this country the spiritual spanking it deserves.
posted by one teak forest (3 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thank you so much for this. I've been following Frank Waln for a couple of years and think he's an amazing artist who deserves to be much more widely known. It's awesome to see this on MeFi.

In general, if you aren't following Native American hip hop these days, you are missing out on some amazing stuff. It's exploding as a genre.
posted by spitbull at 5:38 AM on January 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


I have almost no exposure to hip-hop so I never would have seen this. I’m glad I did. I grew up not too far from there and now that I’m miles and decades away, it has been really interesting observing the changes in my own understanding. I wonder how the attitudes of people I left back there have changed. I like that young people are finding ways to make their voices heard. In the Paper Magazine piece he says:
"... I want people to feel what it's like to be where I'm from. I want them to know what it smells like, tastes like, what the wind feels like, what historical trauma and hope feels like. I want to try and musically take people there."
I think he's doing that.

If you don't think you like hip-hop: Give the My Stone video a shot . It's just lovely. (Can I say that about hip hop?)
posted by evilmomlady at 1:12 PM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


> In general, if you aren't following Native American hip hop these days, you are missing out on some amazing stuff. It's exploding as a genre.

Hey, spitbull (and anyone else following this thread, and also one teak forest!), if you have any other particular recs for Native American/First Nations hip-hop/rap artists, please please drop them here or in my askme that I asked today or via memail or etc. Thank you! I love this guy's stuff.
posted by rtha at 8:48 PM on February 3, 2016


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