Anchorage Daily News

Melissa "Mel" Okitkun, 23, first heard hip-hop in her home village of Kotlik at the mouth of the Yukon River. A relative played it for her the first time.

"He told me I was going to be walking around, bobbing my head," she said.

The songs told an urban story, but like a lot of village kids, she got hooked.

"I really liked the beat of an Eskimo drum, it's similar to hip-hop."

Hip-hop opened her mind to a world of music, and now it has opened her mind to the world of politics. Saturday she spent the afternoon with 70 people at UAA, at "We Are Hip-Hop: Remixing the Art of Social Change."

It was the second workshop sponsored by the young professionals of the Urban League, which used the ubiquitous musical genre to encourage political involvement and voting.

The last workshop inspired Okitkun to register to vote. This one made her think about how women could start businesses. She's excited to vote in the upcoming presidential election, she said.

Participants, who ranged in age from 16 to 35, attended workshops on politics, performance art, the history of hip-hop, and on using their social networks --Facebook.com, MySpace.com, and the address books of their cell phones -- to build relationships that can help them build their influence, promote their ideas and make change.

Among the guests was George Martinez, a hip-hop artist, former Brooklyn city councilman, and United States cultural envoy, who is president of the national Hip Hop Association. He's been traveling all over the world, and he finds hip-hop fans everywhere and across generations.

"I'm 34 years old. I can talk to a 13-year-old and already we have something in common," he said.

Hip-hop lyrics tell the stories of lives and communities, especially people pushed to the fringes because of race and class. The reason hip-hop lends itself to political organizing is because the music is a metaphor for making something out of nothing, he said. Everyone has the ability to contribute and be involved. It started with kids rhyming and beat-boxing in the streets and became an international culture.

"For me it's simply the philosophy that with a little bit today, we can make something more tomorrow," he said.

At the previous workshop, Marco Flores, 19, a senior at Benny Benson, became part of a team of young people authorized to register their friends to vote. He hadn't yet registered any of his friends, but he planned to. He's never voted, but he's been paying a lot more attention to election news, he said.

And why don't his friends vote?

"No one has ever taken the time to talk deeply about it with them," he said.

He couldn't remember the first time he heard hip-hop. It was probably his dad playing Tupac. For some people, listening to hip-hop is the first time they think about politics, he said.

"We have rappers talking about what's going on in their community and how the president is taking care of us," he said. "Hip-hop is political. It's pretty much everything that's going on in life."

Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.

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