Hey everyone, this is Abby Martin. You're listening to the audio version of this episode, which you can watch at YouTube.com slash empire files. But you can also listen to our new exclusive podcast, only at patreon.com slash empire files, which makes all our free video content possible.

Gilippe, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I appreciate it.

My pleasure.

So let's take a look back at your career to start here, because a lot of people are engaged with your music just for the sake of being really amazing music.

You've been recognized by industry leaders, by the hip-hop community as just an incredibly prolific and important self-made artist.

But also, you have chosen to use your music as a vehicle for politics.

And I think that if you didn't do that, you would still be recognized as a very important artist,

but you chose to do that. And I think that your music has had an incredibly profound impact on people

politically. So I think just looking back at all of your work, how do you feel about that?

How do you feel about your music serving as a politically transformative event in someone's

life for so many people?

To a lot of people, revolution is sacred, so I expect them to have a cynical view of it.

I always see people that are skeptical when we discuss these types of issues because to them that struggle is infinite,

that struggle represents something more than just themselves,

it represents an imbalance of just humanity in general.

For example, if we describe capitalism the way we do now in universities, we normalize some

pretty horrific things that happen, but if we put it into simple terms that kids can understand,

like, here's a guy who has one million logs.

He knows that you need to burn a log every day for these families to stay alive. But instead, he refuses to give

them any logs. Now, we know because of this, there are people that are going to freeze and die

over the winter, but we're going to allow that to happen. Now, normally, the course of action would be

for people to rise up, kick the door down with the person that has all the logs, and help themselves

...