Breakbeats catch religion
Carlos Mena's Hip-Hop Meditations takes the hip-hop generation on an inward journey.

By Jeff Chang

BY THE LATE '90s, respected Bay Area hip-hop and spoken word veterano Carlos Mena had been through it all. He was a self-made man, having moved from dope dealing in Brook-nam to computer-network designing in Silicon Valley, from DJing and managing an illegal after-hours club before he could legally drink to developing a rep as a powerful spoken word artist in the Bay Area scene and rocking stages across the country with his hip-hop crew, 10 Bass T. But his group was breaking up, and the tech boom was about to bust.

"I was trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing," Mena says. "I knew that I needed to make a record. But the commercial thing wasn't it. I needed to figure out what I needed to get off my chest." The result was an inward journey set to a sound track of hard hip-hop breaks, an album called Hip-Hop Meditations. The story of this record mirrors the journey a maturing hip-hop generation is now making.

In large and small ways, the hip-hop generation has been moving toward defining itself in the world. This June the first National Hip-Hop Political Convention, in Newark, N.J., will bring together thousands of young people eager to take political power. At the same time, the hip-hop generation is exploring spirituality. Chart-topping rapper-producer Kanye West's latest hit is called "Jesus Walks." KRS-One topped the gospel charts in 2002 with Spiritual Minded, and One Mic radio host Adisa Banjoko, rapper and producer Kool Kyle, and mix-tape hero DJ Vlad are completing a book called Chicken Soup for the Hip-Hop Soul.

These are two sides of the same journey. A decade ago artists like Public Enemy and Paris inspired many to adopt forms of Islam. The trend reflected the tenor of the time; Minister Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, in particular, seemed to capture the combination of self-mastery and social rage that hip-hop heads wanted to express. Now there is growing interest in the West African religions of the Yoruba people.

The Yoruba's root religion, known as Ifá, dispersed through slavery into the New World and took different forms in different settings: Candomblé in Brazil, Vodun in Haiti, Shango in Trinidad, and Lukumi (better known as Santeria) in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. All share an earth-based focus and a cosmology based on the Orishas, deities who embody ancestral powers and particular characteristics of the universe.

"A lot of emphasis is placed on reverence for the universe – the earth, wind, air, stars," Mena says. "A bigger part of it is ancestor reverence, paying respects to your ancestors and communicating with your ancestors." Among the most prominent converts to these religions – often referred to simply as Yoruba in an African American context – are rappers B-Real of Cypress Hill and Tre Hardson (formerly of the Pharcyde), Cuban rappers Los Orishas, singer Vinia Mojica, and hip-hop journalists Raquel Cepeda and Joan Morgan. Their religious practice remains private and personal. There is no missionary impulse.

These days Mena is clothed in white from head to toe, the attire of a newly initiated Lukumi priest. He is called Iyawo, a name indicating that he's in his first year. His home studio in a quiet San Leandro neighborhood is lit with numerous candles. Mena's journey to this point literally began with his desire to go back to the roots of rhythm.

He was born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, and his mother moved him to Brooklyn at the age of two. Although he moved across the ghettos of the borough – from Brownsville to Bed-Stuy to Bushwick – his extended family was always close, usually in the same building. For Mena, Brooklyn was a musical environment fired by immigration and the rise of hip-hop.

"In the building, it was predominantly Latin music, so you'd hear a lot of salsa, Johnny Ventura, El Gran Combo, merengues, Johnny Pacheco, and then also a lot of ballads – Javier Solis. My uncles loved listening to that stuff," he recalls. "But then the minute you leave the house, you could be walking down the street and there'd be a Jamaican dancehall party in a basement. It was just this big, thick cloud of smoke and these giant speakers. You could feel your bones shaking. I would walk down the street, hear some funk music. It was, like, New York, so everything was available to me."

Then hip-hop hit, and Mena would sneak a radio under the covers so he could listen to Special K and Teddy Ted's after-midnight radio show. "I remember seeing the Rock Steady Crew performing and thinking, 'They're doing stuff I can do,' " he says. "That helped to keep me sane and kept giving me the belief that I could make something myself."

Caught up in the rapture, he began rapping, b-boying, and DJing. By the time he had graduated from Bushwick High, he was spinning at an illegal after-hours club. "I would DJ an hour-and-a-half set, and in that set I would play salsa, merengue, Shannon's 'Let the Music Play,' 'These Are the Breaks,' 'Set It Off,' Prince's 'When Doves Cry,' and then go back into some merengue," he says. "It was natural."

Accepted to Princeton University on a full scholarship, Mena left Brooklyn. But the campus and the students thoroughly alienated him. After orientation week, he decided instead to enroll a subway ride away at Brooklyn Polytechnic University, a choice that didn't require him to give up his hip-hop and salsa-clubbing lifestyle.

It was the mid-'80s, and many of his homies had joined the drug trade. His friends were rolling in new Mercedes whips. But he was waiting for his welfare check to arrive so he could eat. "You're going to this really good school, but at that level, you're struggling," he says. "It was like, what am I doing? I'm going to school and doing all this so that I can have that. But I could have that right now."

At the same time, he accepted a job with a downtown computer company that specialized in networking technology. But he was also restless to have the finer things. To supplement his income, he sold powder cocaine to his white coworkers. Soon he was making enough money to drop out of school. "I didn't feel right about the situation that I was in," he says. "One of the reasons I moved to California is that I could see the trappings starting to suck me in."

Landing in Silicon Valley in 1989, he quickly found a job and stepped up his creative work, a path that could move him further from the dirt of his past. Within a year he had hooked up with Matt Brown and formed a hip-hop management company. Their first act was Peanut Butter Wolf and Charizma. Their second act was Mena's own group, 10 Bass T, including pioneering Filipino rapper Slim Daddy Milo and Chicano DJ Selector G. By 1995 they had released Do You Know the Way, an inspired hip-hop debut with dancehall and jazz flavors. (Full disclosure: I've been a friend and fan of Mena since we met in the hip-hop underground in the early '90s, and I'm performing at his record-release party.) But soon after, the group broke up.

Searching for the roots of the rhythms he loved, Mena began to study drumming. But that was just an opening: "If you study music," he says, "it's going to take you to Africa at some point, and so I started looking at African rhythms, and that opened the door to the music of West African religious traditions."

The experience proved to be life-changing. "It started awakening a lot of feelings and memories of things I was associated with as a kid," he says. His wife, Evelyn – who appears on the album leading a meditation – was already studying Orisha worship. Mena decided he wanted to be initiated, but he put it off. First there was an album to make.

Largely done in a six-month immersion period, Hip-Hop Meditations throws sacred, trance-inducing batá rhythms into bold new settings, like the global fusion-minded hip-hop of Wyclef Jean's The Carnival and Common's Like Water for Chocolate, and the big-eared polyculturalism of bands like Ozomatli and Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra. Hip-Hop Meditations best compares with the Last Poets' 1972 classic Chastisement, a word-drunk celebration of jazz-influenced expression and a globalized blackness, and an attempt to merge the street with the big ideas and rhythms of the Afro-Latin diaspora.

That album pulsed with rage. But Mena turns anger toward inquiry and into responsibility and self-improvement. On "Orisha Drink," for instance, he sums up his religion in the first line: "God is you, God is me. Ashe." Then the "fatherless son" asks how to be a man: "How is it done? Do I beat my wife? Do I carry a gun? Do I take a life? Do I make a son?" The answer comes through meditation: "It's never too late for making choices is what I hear from the ancestral voices." On "I.T.S.I.N.Y.O.U.," he clarifies his choice: "I keep doing this until the damage is undone."

After completing the album, Mena surrendered himself to the Lukumi initiation. It was a natural closure to a process that began with rhythms, blossomed into hip-hop, and grew into a life quest. "I see hip-hop as being more than just rapping and dancing and the 3, 4, 5 elements," he says. "It's a philosophy and a way of thinking. If you're really a believer in hip-hop culture, then you believe in the philosophy of hip-hop – respect for everything in the universe."

Carlos Mena performs at his record-release party with Speech, Za, Tre Hardson, Kevvy Kev, David Paul, Jeff "DJ Zen" Chang, Sparlha Swa, AllSeer, and Aya de León, Sat/15, 9 p.m., Oakland Box Theater, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. $10. (510) 290-2277.