City of Rhyme es un proyecto musical de las ONGs Shine a Light, una red internacional de niños de la calle, y Pé no Chão, que trabaja en Recife (Brasil). Organizaron a los niños de la calle de Recife para grabar un CD de hip hop en un concierto al que asistieron 3000 personas. En la grabación participó el compositor local y activista DJ Big. Todas las canciones están disponibles para su descarga y remezcla con una licencia Creative Commons Attribution.
La música es realmente buena (si te gusta el hip hop) y, gracias a Internet, a las licencias CC (y a gente como Ethan Zuckerman, donde yo descubrí este proyecto) puede que estos niños logren ser conocidos en todo el mundo … y puede que sea un pequeña ayuda para un futuro mejor.
Esta es la historia:
Thanks to movies like City of God and Bus 174, the world now knows something about the violence and exclusion suffered by people who live in the favelas (urban shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro, but the most violent city in Brazil is really Recife, on the country's northeastern coast. Endemic poverty, the world's second worst distribution of income, and anarchic gang wars make the city almost unlivable for the poor; but at the same time, Recife's culture is among the richest in the world, with amazing african and indigenous dances and rhythms, a long history of popular poetry, and a strong tradition of popular education.
Local NGOs like Pé no Chão combat marginalization with culture, bringing the best of the favela to the center of the city and forcing the city's elite to take responsibility for the injustice if their midst. DJ Big -- artist, composer, and educator at Pé no Chão -- asked Shine a Light to finance an innovative educational project: to record a CD of a dozen street rappers, boys and girls who work, live, and play on the street and who use rhyme as a way to understand and change their world.
Shine a Light is in the process of producing a major documentary about this process, showing how Hip Hop can at the same time teach kids and transform the world. We wanted to make their amazing music available as soon as possible, so you can download it below …
