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Interview with Daveed Diggs from the Broadway show Hamilton

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Interview with Daveed Diggs in 7x7 Magazine Back in 2012, I called Daveed Diggs's Small Things to a Giant my favorite album of the year. I liked how he addressed gentrification in Oakland , made Gertrude Stein references, and put together a stunning album with his collaborators Rafael Casal and Chinaka Hodge. Well, he's back, and this time with a Grammy. Diggs is an Oakland hip hop artist/actor who's currently starring in the hit musical Hamilton on Broadway. He won a 2016 Grammy award for his performance on the Hamilton cast album, and 7x7 Magazine recently published my  interview with Daveed Diggs . The 7x7 interview is just an excerpt, and I've put the full interview below. Meet the Oakland-Native Who Stars in Hamilton Interview by Matt Werner Transcription by Korin McGinty Broadway’s breakout musical Hamilton is coming to San Francisco in 2017. Daveed Diggs, a rapper who grew up between Oakland, Albany, and El Cerrito, plays two of the leads: Marq...
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What is Hyphy? (1st draft of introduction to Oakland in Popular Memory)

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“What is hyphy?” a Scottish DJ asked me at a Fresh Air: The Alternative meeting in fall, 2008. I had just started grad school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and was attending my first meeting with the student radio club. I had mentioned that I was thinking of doing a show featuring hyphy music. I explained to the first-year undergraduate that hyphy is a fast, hyper-active style of hip hop music from Oakland, California where I was born. I continued, clarifying that hyphy doesn’t involve just music, but it’s an entire movement, which embodies a culture, lifestyle, attire, and an ever-evolving patois consisting of words that for the most part originate from 3 men named Mac Dre , Keak da Sneak , and E-40 . He was intrigued. I went on explaining that the Hyphy Movement involves sideshows, which are wild rallies, often in abandoned parking lots in East Oakland, where people “go dumb,” doing wild car tricks involving “ghost riding the whip,” which is when t...
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Throwback: My Off-Broadway debut!

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Agnus, a crime drama I co-wrote and co-produced, ran at Theatre Row at 42nd St & 9th Ave in Manhattan in January and February, 2018. My co-writer and co-producer, Ise Lyfe, played the title role of Agnus, an odd-looking man who is accused of a heinous crime. The show is set in a futuristic prison barge 30 years in the future, and it explores issues around the criminal justice system and technology. My pitch is that it's a crime drama like "A Few Good Men," but set in the future. Politically, the show was well-timed for the New York audience, in that Donald Trump had been in office less than a year, and he had already tried to establish a 'Muslim ban' and was detaining migrant children at the southern border for indefinite periods of time. Our show addressed these political hot-button issues such as racial profiling and unlawful detention, and we hosted a series of talkbacks and a residency in the space for nonprofits to use our theater for events on dark n...
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