We were lucky to catch up with Nick Cooper recently and have shared our conversation below.
Nick, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Free Radicals’ most recent project, the two album series, White Power Outage volumes 1 & 2, includes the music and voices of over 70 people around Houston, the US, and around the world. Rappers of color in South Africa, Australia, the Gaza Strip, Venezuela, and here in Houston picked out beats they liked, sent in their tracks and collaborated online on the production of their tracks.
The battle against white supremacy isn’t just one against “trigger happy policing,” but is a deep part of the history, economy, real estate markets, and personal lives in all parts of the world that were colonized by Europeans.
We wanted to give rappers, singers, poets, spoken-word artists, and even comedians of color a chance to say whatever they wanted about white supremacy and what they sent in blew us away! We were honored to be part of making this series become part of the public dialog and record.
Nick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Free Radicals has been making music in Houston for 26 years, and its members include artists, educators, and activists. The band can be seen performing at street protests, weddings, funerals, parties, festivals, clubs, and break dance competitions.
On stage, Free Radicals is usually trying to bring people to the dance floor with instrumental music, but on our albums, we get into confronting racism, war, and injustice.
Most bands avoid controversial issues, so as not to alienate potential audiences and listeners, but we do the exact opposite. Even when we take on political issues like racism, we don’t just make safe, ‘racism is bad, ‘ type statements. We explicitly denounce white supremacy.
We may lose some fans, but it connects us with the social movements in the streets that we march to support. Whenever we can get enough guys to play, we can be found marching for justice in Houston. Somehow, we also do a fair number of corporate gigs, and in Houston, that usually means oil money, but we never let our clients change our message. Once we even performed for an oil industry dinner, and then protested outside one of the same corporations’ board meeting the next morning.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
I would have to say bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds has been an incredible reward. If you take for example, one of our newer tunes, “Checkpoint / Dompass / Hajiz,” (https://youtu.be/adOQa64BJL0) we had a diverse group of jazz, funk, flamenco, and Indian classical musicians who laid down the music tracks, and then we had people around the world collaborating on the vocals who all spoke different languages to talk about police checkpoints. Police checkpoint have differences and similarities for all the artists involved.
The first voice you hear is Lindi Yeni speaking in English doing a skit she wrote of an interaction with a South African cop during the apartheid era. Lindi spent many years here in Houston at Kuumba House, teaching South African dance, so she has been a friend and a mentor. Now back in South Africa, in her 70s, she is still working hard at a drug recovery facility. She has performed for Nelson Mandela, and now she has added to the collage of cultures that is part of Free Radicals recordings.
The next voice is EQuality, one of Houston’s prominent voices in the best hip hop for decades. Now with the Hue, and formerly with HISD, EQuality is an incredible performer who also works in the theater arts and architecture.
Then comes Jitsvinger, from Cape Flats, South Africa. Jitsvinger expresses himself in multiple performance disciplines, including theater, guitar, poetry, conceptual writing, composing etc. Jitsvinger suddenly takes the song away from English and switches us to listening to the Afrikaans language (make sure you put on the Closed Captions on the video).
To round out this incredible crew, Prince Alfarra from the Gaza Strip transitions the song into to Arabic, and takes on the Israeli checkpoints notorious for human rights violations, separating families, and even causing Palestinians needing urgent medical care to die waiting. Prince Alfarra seems to be almost trading licks with the percussionist with his incredible percussive rapping.
The reward is the finished product, that traverses linguistic, and geographic boundaries to call out abuses of power. The artists involved have never been, and will never be in the same room together, but nonetheless came together in a way that blows my mind.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Growing up in New York City and living now in Houston, the single thing that I think has the biggest impact on culture is the cost of rent.
When rents are low, culture thrives. When they have it jacked up so high like it is now, no one has any time to do anything cool.
Our corporate economy with real estate companies like Blackrock buying up every formerly affordable place to live causes artists to have to move further and further away from each other, and collaboration becomes impossible.
Contact Info:
- Website: freerads.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freeradicalsband/
- Facebook: facebook.com/freerads/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/freeradsmusic
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/album/2Q843N4io3pn1WnM05QNvH https://music.apple.com/us/album/white-power-outage-vol-1/1528871274 https://freeradicals.bandcamp.com/album/white-power-outage-vol-1 https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/houston/profile/musicians/free-radicals-0915-90065913
Image Credits
photos by Angela Hoang, Tonāntzin Rodríguez, Free Radicals