Tariq Nasheed’s ‘Microphone Check’ Sets The Record Straight On The Original Black American Creators Of Hip Hop

Tariq Nasheed, director of Microphone Check, a documentary about Hip-hop (Credit: Kickstarter).By Corli JayWith her most recent album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyonce has sparked conversations about the Black origins of country music, a genre long co-opted and gentrified by the White masses despite its roots as a Black-founded style of music. A new documentary similarly aims to dispel myths about the origins of one of the world’s most popular musical genres, Hip-hop.“A lot of false claims, a lot of myths, a lot of misconceptions have been thrown out there about Hip-hop, the origin of it [and] where it came from,” said Tariq Nasheed, the director of the documentary “Microphone Check: The Hidden History of Hip Hop.” He adds that myths of the genre’s origins often include that it derived from “African rhythms, Caribbean rhythms and Latino rhythms, excluding the foundational Black Americans here who created the culture.”Nasheed says he felt pushed to work on the documentary amid the 50th anniversary of Hip-hop and the fallacies of conversations about the genre’s roots.& The film hosted its Chicago premiere on May 23 at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, where an audience packed the theater to learn more about misconceptions about the origins of Hip-hop....