"Dr. Cornel West is a man of many missions encircling the black culture.


The Princeton professor and cultural activism frontman has been heralded and disputed for his unorthodox and controversial methods of teaching and melding social studies with urban realities.


But yet and still, the scholar has produced a contemporary project that teaches – a commercial-produced hip-hop rooted CD.


West is no stranger to putting out a disc or two. His first, 2001’s “Sketches of My Culture,” sparked a battle at Harvard where he was formerly a professor. The disc led to another release in 2004 called “Street Knowledge.” The intention was to present the strength of Black music. West is taking it to the next level with his new disc, “Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations,” released today (08-14-07) on Hidden Beach.


This latest offering features a host of hip-hop, soul, and pop artists like Prince, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, Dave Hollister, Jill Scott, and the late Gerald Levert, taking on some of the issues of Black America, as well as gems of commentary from West and prominent activists like Tavis Smiley and Michael Eric Dyson.


“I would like to think that it has historic significance,” West said of the project, “to the degree to which it is a significant awakening with a variety of different voices across generations coming together and saying, ‘The black musical tradition is too rich and deep and refined to be bastardized in this way.’ Hopefully that awakening will generate a whole host of CDs. I would like to see 50 CDs in the next year and a half all wrestling with these same issues; taking it to higher levels – because the artists have their own voices and views. So I think it has a chance to be quite historic.”


And though "Never Forget" is loaded with musical star power, fans of scholar West still might subscribe to the theory that the disc is simple production of spoken social commentary over beats. Those theorists would be wrong. The project’s production rivals any mainstream hip-hop disc on the market.


“The artistic excellence is amazing…,” West said of the disc’s production outcome. “It is highly competitive in terms of present-day commercialism and at the same time it’s an evergreen project. It’s the kind of project that people will come back to over and over again and we hope from generation to generation because it’s a historic moment in which all of these voices came together to act in the progressive and prophetic potential of hip-hop.”


Like the ones before, West put together the disc with a crew called BMWMB, which stands for Black Men Who Mean Business. The men who make up the men behind the projects are West, his brother Clifton West, Mike Dailey and Derek Allen, who came up with the idea for the discs that have come to make a statement about the state of black music while speaking on the state of blacks. The disc is a combination of songs written by the artists and his brother.


“Cliff wrote four of five of them…and a number of the artists wrote their own songs,” West told EUR’s Lee Bailey. “And then often times I would speak in the pocket of the songs that they wrote.”


Mostly rooted in rap and rap culture, the disc challenges the climate in the genre. To that, West spoke about comments of Nas and KRS-One that hip-hop is dead, but explained that the issue is deeper than a style of music.


“We know that hip-hop is such a complicated phenomena with so many different tendencies and a lot of strings and strands within it, and I think that what [Nas] was saying is that the dominant strands is such that it has betrayed the origins of hip-hop. In that sense it is dead,” he said. “To agree with what he’s [saying] and where KRS-One is going, hip-hop is not dead, but there’s a dulling and deadening that has set in the dominant tendency of hip-hop. That’s very much what our CD is trying to call attention to, but especially to link it to the hearts and minds of young folk.”

West continued that in the end the music is not just about the music, calling music "a way of life for black folk."

“So much more is at stake than whether a particular genre is dead,” he said.

West hopes the disc will revive hip-hop in its own way and revitalize both the generation that created it and the generation that is its current caretaker."

“The Lord is using us in a mighty way,” he said, “and it’s a beautiful thing.”

To hear songs from “Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations,” click here: http://www.myspace.com/dr...west4bmwmb