The 13 Best Beers We Drank This Year

/ tonyrehagen

For many, 2022 was time to get back out to drink in person. We sure did—here are our favorites from nearly 800 beers sampled this year.

To many of us, 2022 was the Year of Getting Out. It was a chance not only to hug long-distance loved ones, but also to venture back into large, anonymous crowds at concerts, sporting events and festivals. And whether the occasion was splitting a bomber of barleywine with a couple of old college roommates or striking up a conversation with a stranger at an airport bar, beer fueled and lubricated many reintroductions to the wild.

For me that also meant getting back to beer bars and breweries: politely declining virtual beer tastings and festivals (OK, I still did one or two Zoom-’n’-brews), closing my laptop and getting back on the road. I used my phone not for placing online beer orders and calling in curbside pickups, but for hailing Ubers from the airport to the brewpub to the hotel and back again and checking out new beers from places other than Untappd at Home.

Thankfully, there was still a robust world of craft beer to return to. Alcohol might be recession-proof, but craft beer was only able to weather the last two years with a hard pivot to packaging and self-distribution as thousands of taprooms were at limited capacity or sat empty altogether. That quickly changed in 2022: While the Brewers Association said that retail scan data showed total beer volume sales were down 6.5% in the first half of the year, the craft beer trade group also reported that on-premise sales and draught numbers were trending upward.

I didn’t need a line graph to illustrate the return to the tap—I saw it myself. This year, I tried almost 800 beers, at least one from each of the Lower 48, 20 of which I visited for at least one homegrown beer. I also attended the first in-person Great American Beer Festival since 2019. But it wasn’t just the taprooms, bars and convention halls that were buzzing again. Everywhere I went, from family gatherings to community picnics and fairs, there were revelers clanging their cups and cans together and toasting life, one another and their newly regained freedom.

Here are just a few of my personal favorites for each occasion, classified by season, from my year of getting back out on the beer trail.

To continue to Bloomberg, click here.

Indigenous Brewers Tackle Hops and History With Native Craft Beer

/ tonyrehagen

At breweries like Oklahoma City’s Skydance, even a visit to the taproom is a teachable moment.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday, and beer drinkers line up out the door of Oklahoma City’s Skydance Brewing. They’ve come to toast the downtown taproom’s one-year anniversary with pints of special-release juicy IPA and snifters of one-off pastry stouts. The tipplers are doing more than just celebrating an occasion—they’re also tacitly acknowledging the place’s Native American heritage.

According to a 2021 audit from the Brewers’ Association, only .4% of craft breweries are owned by American Indians or Alaska Natives, compared with 93.5% by White owners. But places like Skydance are proudly touting their culture, not only to differentiate in a crowded marketplace, but also to tell the stories of their peoples.

At Skydance, patrons look up to see American Indian art, like the portrait of a warpainted Cheyenne Dog Soldier rendered by a local Iowa tribesman. They order the flagship Fancy Dance Hazy IPA, named after the popular powwow ritual, or the Rez Dog American Blonde. The Skydance “S” logo emblazoned on the windows, tap handles, and glasses comprises two eagle feathers, a hallowed symbol of dignity in many Native American cultures. “It symbolizes bringing people together,” says Jake Keyes, vice chairman of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, who launched Skydance out of a local brewing incubator in 2018. “Our culture has always been mysterious to a lot of non-Natives, because it was illegal for us to practice our culture for a long time. We were taught to not talk about it. Now we put the stories on the cans and start a conversation. It demystifies it, and that brings people together.”

To continue to Bloomberg, click here.

How the South’s Bourbon Culture Changed Craft Beer

/ tonyrehagen

Love a bourbon barrel–aged stout? You can thank a wild and crazy idea cooked up by Jim Beam and Goose Island.

Todd Ahsmann slides the six-ounce tasting glass closer to him, gently swirls the dark brown liquid therein, and then lifts the glass to his nose, breathing in deeply. 

“I’m getting a bit of chocolate on the nose,” he says.

Then Ahsmann takes a sip, observing the fluid with his tongue, opening his mouth to let fresh oxygen unlock layer upon layer of flavor, even after he has swallowed.

“There’s vanilla, some molasses,” he says. “Some cherry, almond…oak on the back end.”

Ahsmann’s voice echoes against vaulted ceilings and brick walls lined with charred white-oak barrels, stacked four high, each filled with aging alcohol. But this isn’t a typical Kentucky rickhouse, nor is it some cellar in the heart of Napa wine country. It’s the Goose Island Barrel House, where the Chicago-based craft-beer pioneers age their imperial stout for up to sixteen months in used bourbon barrels. 

Tonight, Ahsmann, president of Goose Island, is leading an advance tasting of 2022’s Bourbon County Brand Stout(BCS), released annually nationwide on Black Friday and hunted by beer lovers for weeks thereafter. This year, the brewery is commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the night Goose Island brewmaster Gregory Hall met Jim Beam master distiller Booker Noe II at a beer, bourbon, and cigar dinner in Indiana, and on a whim, the two came up with the wild idea of aging Hall’s then-unremarkable imperial stout in some of Noe’s freshly emptied Jim Beam barrels. The result has become one of the best-known and highest-rated beers in the world.

It’s also, arguably, one of the most influential. When Goose Island began to develop the Bourbon County Stout in the early 1990s, American beer could be summed up in three words: Miller, Coors, and Anheuser-Busch. For decades, the triumvirate of mega-brewers had flooded the country with slightly different versions of the same yellow lager that was, to put it mildly, easy on the palate. Meanwhile, the coming craft beer revolution was only just starting to bubble over from the basements of hobbyist homebrewers. Even the most novel homespun IPA or porter was still largely looked at—and guzzled—as the same working-class libation European immigrants had brought over three centuries before.

To continue to Garden & Gun, click here.

Why Budweiser Should Matter to the Midwest

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“The consistency is staggering”

In Midwestern craft beer circles, there’s nothing cool about Budweiser. Anheuser-Busch was already the Walmart of Big Beer before InBev’s 2008 hostile takeover, after which a disturbingly powerful new American-Brazilian-Belgian conglomerate known as ABInBev cut thousands of jobs in its hometown of St. Louis and moved its sales and marketing operations to New York. 

Of course, ABInBev is still a domineering presence in the Midwest, as it is all over the world. The company’s garrison of Clydesdales, bull terriers, and talking frogs has helped it squeeze diversity—and flavor—out of the domestic marketplace, making room for thirty-packs of cans containing marginally different variations of the same watered-down brew. When craft beer dared to nibble at the outer edges of its massive market share, the company started swallowing up beloved regional microbreweries, including Chicago’s Goose Island and Cleveland’s Platform, and turning them into “crafty breweries,” marketed as craft but backed by big bucks, further nudging truly independent brewers out of prized shelf and tap space.

But despite this litany of crimes against craft, to many beer aficionados, Anheuser-Busch’s most maddening offense might be that its product, namely its flagship Budweiser, is actually, objectively… pretty damn good.

To continue to the Midwesterner, click here.

I Grew Up in a Gas Station: The economics of the gas station mini-mart are more complex than most drivers might imagine. Just ask a guy who was raised in one.

/ tonyrehagen

gasstationI love hot dogs spun to plump, juicy perfection on the roller grill. Add a layer of melted nacho cheese straight out of the dispenser. Make it a meal with a 99-cent bag of Fritos, a fountain soda—half Hi-C orange/half Sprite in a Styrofoam cup—and a King-Size Kit Kat for dessert. That’s comfort food to me. That’s home. I grew up in a gas station.

My father owned at least one rural central Missouri convenience store—Leroy’s Market on Highway 52 and then Leroy’s (Highway) 63 Minimart—from the time I was four. My earliest memories were formed under a huge Phillips 66 shield, and many involved running barefoot up and down aisles. My first job was emptying the trash cans by the pumps (as nasty as you think). Eventually I worked my way inside, stocking shelves before graduating to cashier. It was a cushy gig compared to my friends’ jobs sweating in the hay fields or busing tables at restaurants in Jefferson City, but I had the tougher boss. My father was always hovering—in case someone wanted to buy a 12-pack of Natural Light (which I was too young to ring up), or in case anything strange appeared on the black-and-white surveillance monitor that was trained on the register.

These shifts were some of the closest hours I’ve ever spent with my father. “Don’t wish minutes of your life away,” he’d say when he caught me watching the clock. “Stupid people get old too,” he said after an old guy went off on a Red Scare conspiracy rant. I also learned how to take criticism. Every time sweet old Mrs. Snodgrass (actual name) came in for her pint of bourbon, as she dug into her coin purse, she’d mutter, “You know, C&C’s gas is a penny cheaper.” My dad never said a thing.

It was a common complaint. Nobody cared about the cost of milk or the cash they threw away on dollar scratch-offs. But how dare we mess with the big black numbers on the light-box sign outside? They put my father in an angry knot: If prices were too high, he was greedy; too low and he must be getting rich by pulling in so many cars. My father would smile and nod and say “Thank you” and “Come back soon.” “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” he’d say after they left. He appreciated his customers and didn’t lecture them on the fact that he didn’t actually make his living selling gas.

Read the rest at popularmechanics.com

Leah ‘Gllty’ Hayes is showing the esports world how she’s a ‘magnificent b—-‘

/ tonyrehagen

gllty

A fight is about to go down at the DoubleTree Hilton in Irvine, California, and everyone milling about the hotel conference center seems to know it.

Technically, fighting is what all these people have come here to do. This is West Coast Warzone 6, the first American Capcom Pro Tour Street Fighter V ranking event of 2017. When the tournament starts, these combatants will report to their assigned PlayStations, select a deadly avatar and start jerking joysticks and slapping buttons until one of them is beaten to a bloody pixelated pulp. Two losses warp a player straight home.

As with any game, sometimes things get personal. The world of professional gaming is small. These e-athletes see each other once or twice a month at events all over the U.S. and East Asia. The netherworld of online gaming, where these same players compete almost daily, is even more ripe for conflict. Picture a live chat where participants can actually act out their violent impulses while simultaneously trolling from the safety of a remote location. Stream chats often read like a comments section on steroids. And once someone sticks their keyboard in their mouth, their words follow them at these live tournaments. Sometimes online jabs lead to real-life knuckle-cracking.

 

The internet never forgets. It was almost a year ago, leading up to the 2016 Irvine tournament, that a player named Ghodere took to web and posted: “going to west coast warzone this weekend, in a pool with gllty and ricki/please god don’t let me lose to the two of them i will never recover.” Gllty and Ricki are the handles of two women players, Leah Hayes and Ricki Ortiz, respectively. Obviously nastier things have been said on the internet. Still, the implication was clear: “Please don’t let me lose to a girl.”

Hayes smelled blood. The 28-year-old gamer had already built a reputation for bravado as loud and rowdy as any arcade. When she sat down beside Ghodere for their match at WarZone 5, with the gaming world anxiously looking on, she had no intention of just letting her play do all the talking. “I hear you’ve been running your mouth on the internet,” Hayes said to her foe. “You’re about to get f—ed.”

After beating him, Hayes privately reached out to her chagrined opponent and the two made up. Still, when this year’s Warzone brackets came out with a potential Gllty-Ghodere faceoff in the second round, self-promoter Hayes certainly didn’t downplay The Rematch.

That’s why this morning, the air carries a buzz that has little to do with caffeine, taurine or vaped nicotine. That’s why passersby catch bits of the rumors as they spread across the venue, as if on an after-school playground where a bully is about to get his comeuppance. That’s why at this moment, a couple dozen gamers have left their seats in front of the huge projection screens that feature games of high-ranked players for the scrum around a tiny console in the back of the room, where a diminutive woman clad in black sits beside a broad-shouldered man with a dark beard, both with control boxes, or fight sticks, in their laps.

Knocking an opponent out in two of three rounds wins a game, taking two of three games wins the match. Ghodere chooses avatar Zangief, a brutish, muscle-packed Russian bear-wrestler; Hayes plays Dhalsim, a mystic Indian yogi whose punches and kicks stretch across the entire screen. That flexibility does little to avail Hayes against the aggressive Ghodere, who quickly scores two knockouts to win the first game.

Hayes is uncharacteristically quiet. She grabs a drink of water, draws her blazing red bangs behind her ear. Dhalsim now keeps his distance, sniping from the corner with long punches and fireballs, picking away at the burly Cossack to tie the match at 1.

Still all of the jawing is coming from the swarming crowd, which seems to be buying into the rivalry more than the players themselves.

This matchup is sick! says one man.

This is some good s—, says another.

Game 3: Hayes goes on the assault, spitting a stream of fireballs that stun the Russian, setting him up for the quick KO. Ghodere gets one back in the second round, catching Hayes off guard with a windmill of punches. The final game is nip and tuck as both fighters pick away at each other. But just as time is running out and both avatars’ life bars are nearing the red, Dhalsim leaps into the air and Hayes scores a downward punch to Zangief’s chest, sending him crashing to the ground.

That’s it!

S— was real close.

The crowd disperses. Hayes and Ghodere say little to each other, no smack talk, no pop-off, just a quick handshake as the two unplug their control boxes and move on. “He was posting on a place talking about me where people go basically to vent,” Hayes will later say. “He opened himself up to have fun poked at him. But he didn’t deserve for me to not treat him like a person.”

Read the rest at espn.com

Forgotten Lessons: A century ago, a tragic series of events in East St. Louis set the stage for a national movement—yet today, few people remember the horror.

/ tonyrehagen

riotIt was around noon on a bright Monday in early July 1917, and Lena Cook was on her way home to St. Louis. Cook had just spent the morning fishing with her husband, son, and daughter at a lake  near Alton, Illinois. Now the family was aboard a streetcar in downtown East St. Louis, their first time in the surging industrial city, heading west toward the Eads Bridge.

The city was crumbling around them. Throughout that morning, angry white citizens had been gathering on Main Street outside City Hall, rousing themselves into an enraged swarm. The Illinois National Guard had been called in, and troops were arriving at the train depot by the hour. The first shots had sounded little more than an hour prior. The first black man had been left dead in the street. Before the violence abated, at least 48 people would be killed in one of the worst race riots in U.S. history. More than 300 African-Americans’ homes and business would burn, the smoke visible from Missouri. Perhaps sensing what was to come, dozens of black East St. Louisans had begun their exodus by car, train, or foot, carrying what they could across the Eads Bridge to the west side of the river. Cook and her family were less than a mile from that crossing, at the corner of Collinsville and Illinois avenues, when they heard men shouting: “Stop the car!”

A mob had gathered around the streetcar and pulled its wheel trolley from the overhead wire. Cook felt a hand grabbing at her, tearing the shoulder of her dress.

“Come on out, you black bitch!” shouted a man. He and another man boarded the car. “All you white people get out!” he shouted, vowing to kill any blacks on the trolley.

The white people fled the car. Cook began to plead that she and her family did not live in East St. Louis and certainly hadn’t harmed anyone there. The mob’s leader grabbed her husband, Edward Cook, by the collar, pulled him to the car’s rear platform, and threw him from the vehicle. Then he shot Edward in the back of the head. Another white man grabbed Cook’s 14-year-old son, Lurizza, beat him with a revolver, and started to drag the young man away.

Cook grabbed the child. “You’ve killed my husband,” she cried. “Don’t kill my boy.”

The man jerked Lurizza away, but the lanky teen managed to break free. There was a gunshot. Cook lost track of Lurizza and her 13-year-old daughter, Bernice, when she was dragged into the street by the man who had killed her husband. The mob converged on her, beat her with clubs, kicked her, and pulled fistfuls of hair from her bleeding head. A white onlooker stepped in and begged the brutes to spare the women. The mob turned on him, allowing Cook to crawl away to a nearby storefront, where she was taken in but lost consciousness.

Cook came to inside an ambulance. Blinded by blood that coated her eyes, she groped about in the dark, feeling at least three other bodies around her, and finally found a man’s handkerchief. Wiping the blood away, she looked down to find that she had been thrown on top of the corpses of her husband and son, whose eyes were still open, staring through her. She still had no idea where her daughter was.

Read the rest at stlmag.com

White Space: Matthew Heimbach Has A Dream—A Very Different Dream

/ tonyrehagen

HeimbachI’m sitting alone  in a booth at an empty Pizza Hut just south of the Paoli town square. It’s 1:30 p.m. The “Nazis” are 30 minutes late.

The ones I’m waiting on, the members of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a nascent political organization trying to take root in the seat of Orange County, are indeed nationalists—white nationalists, in fact. They are also proud socialists. And yet I’ll come to learn that these National Socialists feel it is unfair and inaccurate to lump them in with history’s greatest villains. “We’re not trying to rehash the Germany of the 1930s,” TWP leader Matthew Heimbach later explains. “We are National Socialists in our own time, with our own symbols, with our own ideology, and our own solutions to the current problem.”

Words clearly matter with these guys, but if Heimbach’s terminology—solutions—sends a shiver down your spine, you’re not alone. While his group has only 500 dues-paying members worldwide—16 of them in and around Orange County—the 25-year-old’s rhetoric has cast a considerable shadow and earned him bans from social media and the United Kingdom. In 2015, Al Jazeera America profiled Heimbach under the title “The Little Führer.” The Washington Post has pointed out comparisons to former KKK leader David Duke. PBS NewsHour, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post have all described the mysterious base camp where party members live and commune as a “white ethnostate,” supposedly a model for what Heimbach and company envision as an autonomous white nation—right here, in the heart of Southern Indiana—already largely bereft of the multiculturalism that they claim is polluting white America.

I’ll be getting a tour of the compound today, despite the group’s desire to keep secret the location of the white-ethnostate-within-a-white-ethnostate. Heimbach says the party has been receiving an unusually high number of anonymous 3 a.m. calls and online threats of violence to him, his wife, and even his child in the wake of the increased media exposure. Before the tour, we are to have a meeting over pan-crust pizza and Pepsi.

They arrive around 1:35 p.m., three young men clad in black from military cap to boot. Heimbach apologizes again, blaming winter weather for their delay, as the men slide into the semicircular booth. No sooner do they pick up their menus than Heimbach spots Fox News on the flat-screen across the room. The report is from Chicago, where four young African Americans have allegedly kidnapped a mentally disabled white man and livestreamed video of themselves beating the bound-and-gagged victim and assaulting him with a knife, all while yelling, “Fuck Donald Trump!” and “Fuck white people!”

“If four white guys did that to a black youth, cities would be on fire. There would literally be riots right now,” says Heimbach, a burly man in a black overcoat, black beard masking a youthful face. “And you know what? To a certain extent, justifiably so.”

From across the table, Matt Parrott chimes in that one couldn’t find four white men stupid enough to participate in something like this. (Please pause to consider that sentence.) But African Americans? “Trash is gonna be trash,” says Parrott, 34, in a black hoodie and black T-shirt bearing a pitchfork encircled by an industrial gear—the logo of the TWP, which he cofounded with Heimbach, who is also his son-in-law. “We can argue about which community might have more people of this caliber—we could have that conversation.” But instead, Parrott would rather talk about  coverage of the incident and  media conspiracy theories.

The same conversation could be going on in front of this same Fox News broadcast in any small-town restaurant, bar, or home in Red America, especially in a time of conservative backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and widespread distrust of mainstream media. The waitress brings out a couple of pizzas and some wings and tops off our sodas as the conversation drifts into issues like immigration (against it), Donald Trump (for him), Mel Gibson (brilliant director), and how Paoli’s Pizza Hut is somehow superior to other locations. About an hour into the discussion, perhaps sensing that I’m either getting bored or not getting the salacious material I might have expected, Parrott addresses the phantom swastika in the room and makes a prediction about this story.

“This will end up in the final copy: Mein Kampf is a good book that makes some good points,” he says. Then, what I think is intended as a joke: “I was so disappointed. I read the whole book and there was no plan to kill  6 million Jews in it. I was like, ‘Did they take that part out?’”

No one laughs.

Read the rest at indianapolismonthly.com

With his latest album, Pokey Lafarge is giving his old-school fans something new

/ tonyrehagen

Pokey

It’s just after 2 p.m., six hours before showtime, and Pokey LaFarge is sequestered in the third-floor green room of the Castle Theatre in downtown Bloomington, Illinois. He’s tired, strung out from this morning’s two-hour van ride down from Davenport, Iowa, where he and the boys were playing to a raucous house mere hours ago. He sits alone in the corner. Saturday sunlight streams through single-pane windows as he carefully rolls a cigarette.

The silence is interrupted by a knock at the door. LaFarge jumps up, swiping stray bits of tobacco from his fingers on his high-riding brown trousers. He greets a stagehand holding a bundle of purple daisies.

“Thanks,” says LaFarge, taking the bouquet, wrapped in cellophane, and placing it in a vase by the couch. “She’ll love these.”

“She” is LaFarge’s grandmother, who’ll turn 91 in a few days. For the past six years, no matter where the road has taken him, LaFarge has always made a stop in Bloomington as close to February 23 as possible to play this 101-year-old restored movie palace in honor of her and his late grandfather, who shared a birthday with his wife. They were married for 59 years.

Even at 33, LaFarge is a devotee of tradition—from his hand-rolled cigarettes to his vintage clothes to his music, steeped in ragtime, jazz, and Western swing. He plays a 1946 Epiphone Spartan archtop acoustic guitar; he’s a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs. This annual birthday gig is one of LaFarge’s favorite rituals. He was born and raised in Bloomington. Much of his family still lives here. His parents, siblings, cousins, friends, and, yes, the birthday girl herself make up a key contingent of the perennially sold-out crowd that has reliably rocked this ancient venue when LaFarge hits the stage.

The warm welcome home is always a nice boost, especially at the end of a long trip, but tonight’s show should be an even bigger one, because it will be one of the last U.S. gigs they play before LaFarge releases his seventh studio album in May. The new record, Manic Revelations, is quite possibly the biggest departure of LaFarge’s young career. Like his hero Bob Dylan at Newport, LaFarge has “plugged in,” drawing on many more electric instruments. He’s brought in more horns. The music itself shifts more to the backbeat, giving the songs a 1950s and ’60s rock and soul feel. “I wanted this record to be a bigger explosion. I wanted a bigger sound,” says LaFarge. “I feel like it’s more of a worldly record. It isn’t so much about where I come from as it’s where I’ve been and where I’m going.”

At the moment, the South City–based musician’s trajectory seems almost limitless. He’s worked with Jack White and Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show. He’s played Letterman and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. His crooning tenor can be heard on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and his guitar in the film adaptation of The Lone Ranger. LaFarge made his TV acting debut this spring, playing Canadian country singer Hank Snow on CMT’s period drama Sun Records. New York’s Knickerbocker Mfg. Co. released the first items in a new line of LaFarge-designed chore coats, Western-style shirts, and denim chinos in February.

Of course, the further artists drift from their origins, the more they risk turning off core fans. LaFarge has packed tonight’s setlist with songs from the new album among well-worn hits. It’ll be the first time his oldest, most loyal fanbase will hear the new sound.

LaFarge needs to rest. After soundcheck and a quick smoke, he slouches down on the green-room couch, pulls the flat bill of his Cubs ball cap over his eyes, and tries to sleep.

Read the rest at stlmag.com

The Miseducation of Frank Waln

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frank

A young man walks onto an empty stage. The spotlight glares off of his white moccasins and crisp long-sleeved button-down, which billows, untucked, over dark slacks. He cuts a slight figure against the venue’s deep, black backdrop, and his clean-shaven face, framed by two long black braids, makes him look younger than his 27 years. He speaks softly into the microphone, first in his native Lakota, then in English: “Hello, relatives. My Lakota name is Walks With Young People. I also go by Frank Waln. And I welcome you with an open heart and an open handshake.”

Beyond the stage lights, in the darkened auditorium of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sit about a hundred Native American men and women from all over the country: Pueblo, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Apache. The Gathering of Nations, an annual meeting of more than 500 tribes, is taking place across town, and many have broken away from the pow-wow to attend this concert, the culmination of the Rezilience (“rez” referring to reservation) Indigenous Arts Experience. Throughout the festival, visitors have attended events centered on Native art, poetry recitals, and traditional music, most of which celebrate the Native cultures and mourn their hastening disappearance.

Waln, the headliner, is something different. After his introduction, he is joined by the Sampson Bros., Sam and Micco, performance artists whose faces are painted colorfully beneath full and uttering Native dance regalia. Waln bends to his laptop, triggering a barrage of hip-hop beats that blasts across the venue. As the Sampsons dance to the music, the diminutive Waln springs into action, grabbing the mic from its stand and spitting lyrics at the crowd. Pain and anger are palpable in his voice as he bobs and weaves and hacks at the air with his free hand, fighting some unseen onstage foe

The enemy is ignorance, which reveals itself plainly in Waln’s new song “What Makes the Red Man Red,” his send-up of the racist tune “What Made the Red Man Red” from Disney’s 1953 film Peter Pan. Waln’s song samples the tune’s chorus and the film’s offhand references to Native Americans as “aborigines” and “Indians.” That is, before Waln drowns them out with a sharp verse.

Your history books (lies)
Your holidays (lies)
Thanksgiving lies and Columbus Day
Tell me why I know more than the teacher
Tell me why I know more than the preacher
Tell me why you think the red man is red
Stained with the blood from the land you bled
Tell me why you think the red man is dead

The crowd is on its feet now, some singing along, others bobbing in agreement with the beat. Waln’s frequent tours of reservations and his blunt, firebrand style have made him well-known among his people (he’s a two-time Native American Music Award winner). Recently, Waln has made a splash in the mainstream media too: He’s been featured on NPR and MTV’s Rebel Music: Native America and in Vibe and USA Today; he has performed at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and at concerts in France and Germany. The day before his Albuquerque concert, he spoke at a Harvard University symposium on Native politics.

Waln is an ascendant member of a Native American hip-hop vanguard that is taking its message of social justice off of the reservation. What separates Waln and other socially engaged artists, like War Party, Without Rezervation, and Supaman, from older generations of Native artists, says Alan Lechusza Aquallo, a professor of American Indian studies at Palomar College, is their authenticity. Waln doesn’t play to Native stereotypes, like a preaching elder or a fierce sports mascot — his performing persona is young, charismatic, believably real. “There are a number of Native hip-hop artists who play off the kitsch of what it is to be Indian because that’s what’s going to give them notoriety,” Aquallo says. “[Waln] has his long braids, but he’s wearing street clothes. He’s not playing Indian.”

Waln’s activism is similarly more than mere posture. As Aquallo points out, Waln “walks the walk,” not only rapping passionately about depression and poverty on the reservation, but also demonstrating against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington and speaking to students in high schools and elementary schools on reservations across the country. “He’s not an ‘Indian artist’; he’s not a rapper who happens to be Native,” Aquallo says. “To him there’s no separation between his activism and his creative work.”

Waln’s overall message is plain: Americans — Native and non-Native alike — need to educate themselves about the real history and current politics of America’s indigenous people. And through his words and music, on the reservation and off, Waln plans on delivering the wake-up call.

Read the rest at psmag.com