EMERGENCE

In a recent article in The Nation, Jeff Chang (author of Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation) argues for arts and culture to take a leading role in rebuilding our economies and communities. He cites Invincible & Finale's Locusts docu-music video as an example of the kind of leadership we need.

Excerpt:

In Detroit the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, built around the inimitable 93-year-old woman who gives the center its name, has served as a home for some of the city's sharpest young organizers and artists, in its Detroit Summer program. One of them, the acclaimed rapper Invincible, has produced an eleven-minute video for her song "Locusts." It serves not just as a fine documentary of the center's work against gentrification and displacement or a profound meditation on the Motortown's past but also as a defiant middle finger in the face of pessimists like [Richard] Florida, who all but wrote off Detroit in a recent Atlantic Monthly cover story.

Read the full article, "The Creativity Stimulus".

Watch Locusts: