Baraka Noel

I got this record in a cracked slim line jewel case with nothing but a free vistaprint.com business card inside that said, “check out my new album.” The disc the same reflective blue green of my favorite Memorex bootlegs and I’d put money on the off center label being a home printed Avery sticker. It sat on my counter for days before I got up what I felt like was the patience that would be required to listen to what I assumed would be home demoed ramblings passed off as an album. The Hip Hop requisite movie clip introduces the album, the movie of choice Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Okay, I’m not excited, I walk off to grab something from the other room and then…BAMM! It takes 54 seconds to hear that this record has the potential to say something entirely new in the coming tracks.

Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me from a kid that earned a full ride to Oberlin College to study theater. Baraka Noel isn’t an emcee. Or rather, it would be ignorant to pigeonhole him in such an obvious way because his record is sitting in front of you. Check out his CDBaby.com page and find out that he is also the author/director a one man show used as a companion piece to the record. The idea of Hip Hop expanding into performance art beyond the boundaries of Jay-Z’s bikini clad video vixens is nearly unheard of.

That said, it seems obvious that Baraka is an extremely literate man. He links vowels together like the best of Rakim or Nas’ first record but he does it with a vocabulary that will leave Hot 97 artists reaching for their Roget’s. Even the unassailable “mine is bigger than yours” bragging rights so synonymous with rap get turned on their head in the Puff Daddy meets Shaft “All Right” when he quips, “length of my penis proportionate to willingness to be evil.”

I hear Mixtape Philosophies… as a step out from the ever-present shadow of A Tribe Called Quest. Low-key jazzy productions laced with intelligent topical lyrics that stretch the stereotypical limitations of hip hop. Take “Europe’s Not A Continent,” which screams about the US violations of the Geneva Convention and name drops Cornell West (See The Matrix’s elder advisory board or Harvard’s liberal messiah) while proclaiming “they keep our freedom’s safe by taking it away. Till the one right remaining is the right to remain silent.” These genre-bending themes are consistent. Ecological concerns, the lingering mentality of a nation that murdered Emmett Till, the list just goes on.

I couldn’t find any kind of bio on Baraka Noel, and the record doesn’t even list a label. My take on it is this is a college kid (maybe recent graduate) who is pedaling homespun records on CDBaby.com and at a corner table in the lobby after performing his play at small university theaters. The music here is well above average but won’t revolutionize hip-hop’s sound. The lyrics however will change your perception of what intelligent hip-hop could be.

– Brian Hull
- Okayplayer.com

The DeCafé bustled noisily around us, but I hardly noticed as hip hop artist Baraka Noel OC ’06 spun a web of dreams in front of me — a web in which he hopes to catch the hearts, minds and ears of anyone who will listen.

When I began to define this column in my head, I must admit that I had prematurely boxed myself into the smaller space of folk music. While not a bad space to be, it would have left me blind to the growing hip hop scene here on campus.

Baraka had e-mailed me when he saw that I would be writing about Oberlin musicians, just hours after the Review had gone to press that week.

“[I] got kind of excited about all the people I knew who fit into the mold of what you were talking about,” he wrote.

So we ended up sitting in the DeCafé on a busy Monday evening.

Baraka graduated officially this summer after taking some extra classes to fulfill requirements, but he is still on campus, working at the Multicultural Resource Center and beginning his career as a hip hop artist. In addition, he’s trying to pull together all the individuals and groups here on campus already creating hip hop music.

“I want to form more of a hip hop community with people here, with people everywhere else, because I feel like if artists — instead of pushing each other down to get up — if we all work together and put our money together and come together, we have so much power; there’s so much energy and passion that can come out of that,” he said.

As an Oberlin student, Baraka was heavily involved in theater. His album, The Mixtape Philosophies of Mushroom Black, is first and foremost the soundtrack to his show by the same name.

The hip hop theater movement has spread widely across the country. Baraka praises it for its universal message and ability to cross state boundaries.

Change is also an integral component of Baraka’s philosophy.

“You don’t have revolutions without revolutionary art,” he said.

In particular, Baraka would like to see a change in the education system.

“I feel like poetry can be science; it can be a way to think about the world and question assumptions. Anything that you can express in a book, you can express in a song,” he said.

Once, while taking a course on LGBTQ identities, Baraka had trouble completing the response papers the professor required.

“I was struggling because I was really interested in what was going on, but I couldn’t get myself to do these readings and then write three pages to respond to it — I couldn’t connect with that,” he said.

The professor suggested that he write his response in verse instead of the traditional academic prose.

“Instead of trying to format my thoughts in this really formal, artificial way, I got to process it in a way that was meaningful to me,” he said. “And I think that there are so many ways — if we value art — that art can be used to educate.”

I listened to Baraka’s album (which he produced himself in order to have something to send to reviewers and labels), and the education issue comes through most strongly in track nine, “New Year.”

“I’m trying to grow up / but I was raised by the school system / they forgot to teach me what to do if I ever get loose from it,” he sings.

In his music, Baraka tackles other issues as well, spanning the diverse areas of politics and religion through sophisticated lyrics.

Now he is working on setting up a career. Okayplayer, an online hip hop community, has reviewed his album with high praises. He is hopeful for the future.

“The moment is rich / like I’m holding the holy scriptures / hoping to paint a poem picture / of road trip visions,” he says in the opening track of The Mixtape Philosophies of Mushroom Black, “Road Trip Visions.”

More than anything, Baraka hopes that we can help get hip hop musicians going here on campus through general support and recognition.

“If you love hip hop, and you’re at the ’Sco and you’re an Oberlin student, I hope you’ll play Oberlin hip hop,” he said.

He has a point. Here’s to playing our own music in our own venues as often, and as visibly, as possible.

By Laurel Fuson - The Oberlin Review