Mosley Wotta releases new album |
Mosley Wotta releases new album
The Bulletin
Bend, Oregon
2012-09-14
Bend hip-hop artist performs in Bend tonight
Anyone who knows local artist, musician and educator Jason Graham—aka MOsley WOtta, leader of the hip-hop band of the same name—knows that his relocation to Bend at age 9 from Chicago’s north side has had a profound and longstanding effect on his worldview, and thus, his art.
Get Graham, 29, talking (not a difficult task at all), and you’re likely to eventually hear about his experience as a mixed-race kid moving from an ultra-urban environment to the lily-white Bend of a decade ago. And he won’t hesitate to point out that his own stereotypes about “the country” were as deeply entrenched as those he encountered in others.
The collision of race and culture is a subject Graham has always touched on in his music, going back to his time in the local rap collective Person People, up through his first solo album, 2010’s “Wake.”
But tonight, Graham will celebrate the release of the second Mosley Wotta album, “KinKonK,” at the old PoetHouse Art space in Bend (see “If you go”), and at the same time, he’ll unveil a more direct, more forceful and more thoughtful set of songs on the subject than he ever has before. It’s also material that may surprise some of the folks who’ve come to love the Mosley Wotta band that, since winning Bend’s inaugural Last Band Standing competition two years ago, has dominated local festival stages with its upbeat funk-hop and positive message of unity through music…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Ben Salmon, Bend, Jason Graham, MOsley WOtta, music, Oregon, The Bulletin