Remarkable Current: Hip Hop with a Conscience

By: Anisah Hashmi

In an industry plagued by vulgarity and no originality, there is hope for fans with a more sophisticated sound palette. Remarkable Current, a socially conscious record label, is changing the game with one artist at a time. It seems for the first time, Muslim Americans can find music to relate to without having to create parodies or censor the lyrics. With lines like “Everybody crying cause they ain’t seeing no pay checks, sky-scrappers lookin’ like some modern day slave ships. I’m in amazement, the date – keep changin’. It’s Two Thou-Something… do the still make racists?” from Crème De La Ultra’s Strange Love. Nowhere else will you find lyrics as politically pertinent to the Muslim American community.

Remarkable Current began as a side project of Hip Hop artist DJ Anas Canon in the hopes of providing fellow artists a creative outlet to express spiritual, social and political consciousness through music. Over the past ten years, Remarkable Current has changed its contours and objectives to include programs like Hip Hop Ambassadors and artists like Baraka Blue, who, like his counterparts, uses art to approach more politically charged conversations. As they’ve traveled the world, their music has grown beyond its Muslim American roots. “[We’re] having very honest discussions about what’s going on in the world, who we are as people, [and] our experiences within that context,” says Canon.

Named one of the “500 Most Influential Muslims Worldwide,” Canon hosts a radio show called Center of Intention featuring soul, funk, reggae and R&B sounds. In the process of music making, he is also helping to shape a facet of Muslim American identity through his public persona. Canon feels that Muslim Americans are in a unique position to integrate Islamic values in a way that compliments their American lifestyles. “It’s valuable for us Americans to realize that just like these other countries have opportunities to decide who they are culturally visa vie their religion, we as Americans have that opportunity to determine who we are culturally visa vie our religion.”

Canon serves as a cultural ambassador through a self-created program called the Hip Hop Ambassadors. This program has helped to mold a universal and global youth culture by utilizing Hip Hop as its primary mode of transmission. With over thirty performances and impressive media coverage, the Hip Hop Ambassadors swept Indonesia on their biggest tour to date. Their most memorable concert, Canon notes, was at an Islamic boarding school in Bogor, Indonesia with an audience of 18,000 people. Described as an unimaginable occasion, the band closed with a Hip Hop song featuring a call and response chorus in Arabic to the tune of a Jimi Hendrix cover.

As the record label shifts into a non-profit model and their existing programs expand, the current members are working on a number of projects including the “Center of Intention” musical exchange with children from around the world and launching a few albums from artists like The KAJ and Crème De La Ultra. Canon’s DJ styling’s can be found on all future records so stay tuned for the multicultural sounds of Remarkable Current.

To view the video of the cultural ambassadors’ performance of the Jimi Hendrix cover at the Nural Iman Boarding School in Indonesia, go to: http://bit.ly/aZohQm

*Image by: Mimi Charakova