New artists confirmed to perform at the 2011 festival include Dead Prez, Ying Yang Twins, Da Beatminerz, Fashawn, Torae, Varsity Squad, Stanza, Grip Plyaz, Killa Kyleon, Voli, RayDawn, Reef The Lost Cauze, Statik Selektah, Sha Stimuli, A.Dd+ and Clan Destined.

New Jersey's Kosha Dillz, Michigan's JYoung The General and North Carolina's Joe Scudda won HipHopDX's Pick 3 interactive contest to join headliners Random Axe, Freeway and Homeboy Sandman on the October 6 showcase.

The DJBooth.net showcase on October 7 presents Big K.R.I.T., Pill, Jean Grae, Aleon Craft, Saigon, Dee-1, J.NiCS, Shane Eli, Yonas, Jon Hope and the League of Extraordinary Gz. The stage will be hosted by Hustle Simmons.

GoodMusicAllDay and Earmilk have teamed up to present Blog Party on an outdoor stage on October 8 from 6 - 8:30 p.m. featuring artists MURS, Ski Beatz, Phil Ade, Young Scolla, Tabi Bonney, Nottz, G-Eazy, Huey Mack and NatNaiel.

These are just a handful of the several hundred artists and events to be announced for the 2011 A3C Hip Hop Festival. Performers and showcases will be released on a continual basis until the start of the festival.

In addition to more than 200 live performances, A3C provides educational and professional development content. There will be eleven panel discussions on topics including marketing, licensing, production, media, international strategy, visual interpretation, women in Hip Hop and more.

Confirmed panelists include industry professionals such as DJ Burn One, Wendy Day of the Rap Coalition, HipHopDX Editor in Chief Jake Paine, John Gotty of the Smoking Section, SESAC's Cappriccieo Scates, Universal Music Group's Ricardo Spicer and A Tribe Called Quest's Jarobi.

The A3C is the largest Hip Hop festival in the southeastern United States and the premier gathering place for MCs, DJs and producers that create Hip Hop music as well as participants and fans of the culture.

A3C Hip Hop Festival tickets are available on the A3C website. 3-day passes are $40 online and $45 at the door. For discounted hotel accommodations, contact the Days Inn Atlanta Downtown at 1-866-650-7925 with the event name, A3C Festival, and booking code, A3C.

The hotel is located at the intersection of Spring Street and Baker Street, approximately 2 miles from The Masquerade. For discounted airfare, call AirTran at 1-866-68EVENT (1-866-683-8368) and reference event name, A3C Festival, and event code, ATL100311.

Specific showcase, panel, artist and event updates will continue to be announced through the A3C website through the event's start on October 6, 2011. For more information about becoming involved in the A3C as an artist, partner, volunteer or media representative, visit www.a3cfestival.com.

"Wake up, you're walking in a dead man's shoes."

New music from Dead Prez. Listen to it right here.

While M1 will be busy with these academic duties, his main focus will be completing The Africana Digital Project, an experimental music venture from Haverford's faculty and students manifesting in an M1-produced EP that will be available for free download.

“I'm excited about working on The Africana Digital Media project and doing some groundbreaking collaborative work.”

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jesse Shipley, who played a central role in convincing M1 to take on the residency, commented that,

“To have him engage with faculty and students in processes of production is a creative forum for both sides, because in some ways it brings a different kind of energy to what he's doing, and it brings his kind of energy and his engagement as a performer and musician to the campus.”

Although all M1 related activities are for the Haverford College students and faculty only,be on the lookout for The Africana Digital Project and Dead Prez's forthcoming album Information Age.

MORE  HIP-HOP WIRED NEWS AND VIDEO

"Love And Hip-Hop's" Emily B Talks Relationship With Fabolous, "He's The Star Not Me" [Photos/Video]

Toccara And Lance Gross Host National Launch Event For African Pride's 'My Pride, My Way' Campaign [Photos/Video]

Big Heed And Alien Talk Their Single "Tipsy", Skinny Jeans And Being 106 And Park's House Band [Video]

Shinobi Ninja Attacks The Music World With A Hip-Hop Reggae & Rock Blend [Video]

J. Cole Performs At Cameo In South Beach Miami [Photos/Video]

Cali rapper, Murs and Guerilla Union announced the acts scheduled to perform at the sixth annual Paid Dues Festival on Saturday, April 2nd 2011 at the NOS Events Center in San Bernardino, California.

Bun B, Black Star, Immortal Technique, Dead Prez, Asher Roth & Nottz are some of the names gracing one of the Paid Dues stages.

On another stage, the based God, Lil B, Bay area-veteran, E-40, former XXL magazine freshman, Nipsey Hussle and Murs himself will headline.

This year, a "Grind Time Now" stage has been added to the festivities. Not only will fans get to see Slaughterhouse, Chino XL and Blu & Fashawn go in but battle rappers such as Dizaster and Dirtbag Dan are on the bill.

For those unfamiliar with Grind Time, it is a league famous for putting rappers against each other in a timed, battle arena. This Paid Dues show is looking to surpass its predecessors.

Known for bringing together some of the best underground and mainstream hip-hop acts for a full day of live performances, Murs and Guerilla Union have successfully pulled off great showcases of talent for the last five years.

2010's festival included Raekwon, Jay Electronica, Tha Dogg Pound and hip-hop legend, Ice Cube to name a few.

Cop tickets here http://paidduesfestival.com/tickets/

MORE  HIP-HOP WIRED NEWS AND VIDEOS

Follow Us On Twitter

As the fourth entry to their Turn Off The Radio series, the duo tackles instrumentals such as "Beamer, Benz Or Bentley", "Over" and "Swagga Like Us", with a bit of a political twist that only they could pull off.

"Far From Over"

[Check after the jump to DOWNLOAD dead prez' latest]

Download here.

Award-winning law professor Paul Butler titled his inspirational and somewhat subversive book, “Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice” after dead prez's debut album because he wanted to send a subliminal message of camaraderie to the most incarcerated population in the history of the world – the Hip-Hop generation.

For years Butler, a Yale and Harvard graduate, worked as a federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, a city notorious for its drug infestation that heightened around the same time the incarceration rate increased as did the popularity of Hip-Hop. Butler was on the prosecutorial team when former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was charged with possession of cocaine. Then one day, 33 years after Butler had been raised in the inner city by his single mom to become an accomplished African-American without a criminal record, he was arrested for a crime he didn't commit and his perspective was changed.

It was a petty neighborhood beef over a parking spot that sparked his revolution, but turn he did. He left his post as a prosecutor and is now lecturing about how the War on Drugs and the fact that because the United States has more people locked up for drug crimes than people locked up for all crimes in the European Union is making our land of the free dangerous grounds where parents are missing from homes and low-level criminals are being bred for recidivism.

His soundtrack, he notes in “Let's Get Free...” is Hip-Hop, because like no other multi-ethnic popular culture, this group of artists and consumers has a viewpoint that may save our nation. In Hip-Hop, he notes, justice is simple: “If you kill my dog, I'ma kill your cat,” and even though we don't love the crime, we love our criminals: “I'd open every cell in Attica/send ‘em to Africa,” because we know that crime and punishment destroys neighborhoods.

So, to reverse what has been an alarming increase in jail building and lock ups, Butler outlines legislative ways that have long been acknowledged – focus resources on education and rehabilitation. He also calls for the individual to work the system (since the system isn't working) through the completely legal practice of jury nullification in cases involving nonviolent drug offenses.

Jury nullification is what happened in the Barry case when, although the videotape evidence overwhelmingly pointed to guilty, the jury declared Barry not guilty either out of love and for the man or disdain for The Man. Or, as Butler says, “When we return to the best values of the patriots – their trust in the common person and their suspicion of an overbearing government – we will live up to the democracy's highest ideals.”

For more information on "Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice," log on to log on to www.letsgetfreethebook.com/.

Also check out Hip-Hop wired's interview with Paul Butler here.

New policy guidelines will be sent out today by the Justice Department outlining that the federal government is not to arrest medical marijuana users who are in compliance with state laws. That's one small step for marijuana advocates, one huge leap for those of us who know the War on Drugs is like looking for WMDs – the destruction is the war, not the drugs.

Here, he talks to Hip-Hop Wired about why a soldier should keep his head up.

Hip-Hop Wired:  In “Let's Get Free...” you also suggest that when individuals are called for jury duty we practice jury nullification – finding someone not guilty of a nonviolent drug offense despite the evidence. It's legal, but is it subversive?

Paul Butler: It's subversive of the present system which needs subversion. Any system that's locking up more people than any criminal justice system in the history of the world needs fundamental change and unfortunately, the politics are that we're not going to get that from our lawmakers unless we insist. So what the strategic nullification does is insist.

It sends us very strong messages, “Well you can have these laws but we're not going to follow them,” which is the same thing that the people who sat in on the lunch counters said... The nice thing about nullification is it's legal so in a sense it's different than that kind of civil disobedience, but what it sends is a message that these laws are about oppressing people and discriminating against people and they should not be enforced.

Hip-Hop Wired:  Oppressive and discriminatory, sure, but should we really be surprised that we have the highest rate of incarceration in the history of the free world when this country was founded by people who stole labor and land to build it?

Paul Butler: We have this great moment in American history now where we have an African-American President. So it's true we were founded by people who stole land from Native Americans and then built the land with slaves who were mainly taken from Africa.  And those were the same people, including slave holders, who wrote the Constitution and now we have all these Black people who are no longer slaves but who are in prison and so it is easy to be sort of defeated and think well there's just no reason to be hopeful, but then a long comes a guy named Barack Obama... You know, it's just an amazing moment in history. I'm probably more optimistic now than I would've been two years ago that there really is, in spite of all of the baggage that the Constitution carries, it also holds some promise.

Hip-Hop Wired:  What can we do to better engage politically the power of the Hip-Hop community?

Paul Butler: What I would love to see happen is for more of the artists to become activists. Now, a lot of times people say, “Well that's not my role, my role is to create art, to make something beautiful or provocative,” but it's not a luxury, the idea of these people using their skills for art only.  It's a luxury that I think the Hip-Hop  nation can't indulge. Art is also embodied in what you do everyday and what you use everyday and I think that that notion has to become more realized in Hip-Hop.

Yes, you're artists and yes you make beautiful rhymes and you put together dope beats, but your community needs you. People who are getting locked up, people who are hurting other people…they listen to you, that's an extraordinary power.  So the question is…Are you going to use that power in a responsible way?

Hip-Hop Wired:  Given the debate about Hip-Hop in the mainstream, why did you take such a clear Hip-Hop perspective to address the criminal justice system and to share an idea as serious as jury nullification?

Paul Butler: Because mass incarceration is an extraordinarily serious problem. It's been a problem since the 1980s and people a lot smarter than me have been complaining about how many people we're locking up and those complaints have fallen on deaf ears so I wanted to write a book that a lot of people would read... The title from the dead prez album really communicates to people who know this is a little something different.

Hip-Hop Wired:  What does being “free” mean to you?

Paul Butler: In a legal sense, it means that if I'm driving down the street and I see a cop car behind me then my heart doesn't have to start beating fast. I get stressed out. And that's what happens to me now, especially if I don't have on a suit. That's not the kind of society that I want to live in. I want to know that as long as I'm obeying the law, police are going to leave me alone.

Hip-Hop Wired:  In your book you outline things legislatively that need to be done – addressing employment, education, and healthcare as ways to reduce the incarceration rates, in addition to individuals taking action such as jury nullification. What else can we do as individuals to get free?

Paul Butler: Helping a kid graduate from high school. If you do that, you make an enormous debt in the prison population because most of the people who are locked up don't have high school diplomas... In the book I wish I talked more about training parents. The good news is we have thousands of people in the community who could teach that because we have thousands of people who have very successfully raised kids and they understand their skills that could be taught that doesn't require Congress to pass a law.

For more information on Paul Butler and “Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” log on to www.letsgetfreethebook.com/.

Check out Hip-Hop Wired's review of “Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice” here.

DMC: The King Of Rock Calls For Rappers To Take Responsibility For Their Words Read Here

African Albinos Murdered, Body Parts Sold to Witch Doctors Read Here

Ice Cube To Receive BET "Icon Award" Read Here

NCAA Championship Leaves South Carolina Due To Confederate Flag Read Here

Obvious Racist Audra Shay In Charge of Young Republicans Read Here

Bangin Candy: Somethin' The Lawd Made Click Here

Guru: Gangstarr Reunion With DJ Premier Not In The Works Read Here

D.C. Mother Accused of Killing Her Four Children Gave Her 3 and 4 Year Old Marijuana Read Here

T-Pain & Pitbull Make New Dolphins Theme Song Read Here