KPFA - Hard Knock Radio

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post Year in Review: Music 2025 Part Two appeared first on KPFA.

The Hard Knock Radio Year-End Roundtable brought together four sharp musical minds to break down the biggest shifts, sounds, and cultural currents of 2025. DJ D Sharp, Nastia Voynovskaya of KQED Arts & Culture, Chuck Creekmur of AllHipHop.com, and Jason Myles of This Is Revolution Podcast joined Davey D for a wide-ranging conversation about trends, tours, regional movements, algorithms, and the changing ways communities connect through music.

A major theme across the panel was the return of regional identity. From Afrobeats and Amapiano to Dominican dembow and emerging sounds across Mexico and the Caribbean, 2025 continued to show how global scenes now feed into local ones. Nastia emphasized the Bay’s own diversity, with artists like Fijiana, LaRussell, Overcast, Jamel Griot, and Rexx Life Raj each representing totally different lanes. D Sharp argued that the Bay is thriving, despite recurring myths that the region “isn’t on,” calling out new music and producers like Overcast who are contributing to national conversations.

The panel also dug into the resurgent influence of veteran MCs. Nas and DJ Premier’s new project sparked heavy debate online — partly because nostalgia battles with expectations. D Sharp and Chuck both argued that the record delivered what fans of that lineage want. Jason pointed out that contrarian hot takes are now a commodity, pushed by algorithms and bots more than genuine critique.

Nastia spotlighted the explosion of R&B this year, from Kehlani’s chart-topping return to rising voices across the map. Major tours — Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Cleo Sol, Doechii — showed that live performance is still a central force for building community despite industry headwinds.

Throughout the discussion, the guests kept coming back to community over algorithms. Chuck warned that streaming platforms quietly shape visibility, suppress voices, and fracture the shared listening experience. Jason argued that people need third spaces again — places where young artists can experiment, fail, learn, and grow without the internet’s instant judgment. D Sharp talked about the value of hyper-local hustle, showing up everywhere, building a base one city at a time.

By the end, everyone agreed: music remains a language of connection, and 2026 will belong to artists and communities that stay rooted, experiment boldly, and build their own ecosystems beyond algorithmic control.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post Year in Review: Music 2025, Part One appeared first on KPFA.

Gerry opens with the shock of losing so many R and B icons in a short period, especially an eight person stretch in about ten days. He stresses the need to go see your heroes while they are alive, support them financially, and stop dismissing older artists because they are over forty. For him, seventies music remains the blueprint for everything that came after, and younger media folks disrespect legends when they chase new stars without even knowing who people like Babyface are.

Rickey talks about the emotional toll of losing these artists, explaining that they shaped Black identity and carried whole generations through life. He highlights how people like Frankie Beverly, Sly Stone, D Angelo, Roy Ayers and Dwayne Wiggins were versatile musicians who could make dance floor anthems, deep ballads and political statements, and who saw music as part of a river of Black creativity, culture and liberation. He also points out the lack of real institutions that honor Black music legends and how corporate control of catalogs blocks museums, tributes and political songs from being fully shared.

The three connect this musical loss to political struggle, bringing in H Rap Brown, later Jamil Al Amin, and his influence on James Brown and on early rap style. They remember a time when funk and soul artists were accessible in the community and their music tracked directly with Black movement politics, something that is now more tightly regulated and commodified.

Throughout the conversation they give listeners homework: dig into Dwayne Wiggins, D Angelo’s Brown Sugar, Jerry Butler, Brenton Wood, Angie Stone and especially the deep catalog of Roy Ayers. They close by plugging Rickey’s History of Funk show on KPFA and Gerry’s I Remember That Song program, both dedicated to keeping this musical history alive and in conversation.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

The post In Memoriam: The Music Icons We Lost in 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

Davey D sits down with journalists Tim Redmond of 48 Hills and Rasheed Shabazz of Oakland Voices for a local year in review that ties Bay Area stories to national power plays, housing fights, and media battles. Tim opens by arguing that the big political shift in San Francisco is from a fear driven crime narrative to one centered on affordability. He contrasts Daniel Lurie’s crime focused mayoral win with New Yorks Zoran Mamdami, who ran on freezing rent, free transit, and childcare. In San Francisco that plays out through zoning fights on the west side, luxury projects like the Marina Safeway tower, and speculation driven by international capital, all while many new high rises sit half empty and regular people cannot afford rent.

Both guests connect this to prosecutors and policing. Tim and Rasheed note that reform minded district attorneys like Chesa Boudin and Pamela Price were intensely scrutinized, while their tougher on crime successors in San Francisco and Alameda County face far less media heat even as they file harsh charges, including against Gaza and ICE protesters and in the Stephen Taylor police killing case. They warn that this shift is happening alongside a Trump driven ICE crackdown and a mayor in San Francisco who appears more interested in staying on the presidents good side than defending sanctuary values.

Rasheed widens the lens to the local news ecosystem, talking about doom loop narratives pushed by outside content creators, the decline of corporate outlets, and the rise of community based projects like Oakland Voices, Coyote Media Collective, and Bay Area Current. He also highlights Blackstone and other real estate investors displacing tenants, rising evictions in Oakland, and the growing elder homelessness crisis. Looking ahead, Tim points to Pelosi’s retirement, a high stakes congressional race, billionaire influence over city policy, and the coming Super Bowl as flashpoints for austerity politics and sweeps of unhoused residents. Rasheed closes by flagging his reporting on Flip Cause withholding millions from nonprofits and raising alarms about how tech platforms and big philanthropy quietly shape both local media and frontline community work.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Davey D closed out 2025 with a sharp, no-nonsense roundtable that examined the year’s major political fault lines while looking ahead to what communities should prepare for in 2026. Joining him were four voices who remained consistent even as platforms shifted and institutions retreated. Melina Abdullah, professor, organizer with Black Lives Matter Grassroots, and host on KBLA Talk 1580 in Los Angeles. Nora Barrows Friedman, longtime journalist and editor with Electronic Intifada. Kamau Franklin, organizer and host with Black Liberation Media based in Atlanta. And Melinda, known to Hard Knock listeners as Brown Girl Pride, a Colorado based commentator and military veteran focused on decolonization, Indigenous rights, and abolition.

Brown Girl Pride opened the discussion by challenging one of the most repeated media narratives of the year, the idea of a single Latino voting bloc. She argued that the labels Latino and Hispanic operate as tools of erasure, collapsing Indigenous, African, Asian, and mixed identities into one category and then using that distortion to justify political abandonment. In her view, exit poll headlines were not simply inaccurate but strategic, designed to dull public concern for communities that would soon face intensified repression. She framed the deeper task as decolonizing political values, not just language, and warned that colonial power thrives on confusion about identity and history.

Melina Abdullah built on that analysis by naming what she described as an underreported reality of 2025. People never stopped fighting. From actions at detention centers and city halls to ongoing Palestine solidarity work and resistance to Cop City, she described a movement landscape where the battlefront is everywhere and there is no sheltered rear. She rejected the false choice between open fascism and softer liberalism, arguing that real freedom depends on solidarity across Black liberation, immigrant justice, Palestine, land back, and abolition.

Davey D connected those points to what he identified as a defining theme of the year, disinformation and manufactured division. He pointed to coordinated online narratives calling for ICE raids in places like Oakland and Chicago, and described how the chaos forced organizers and journalists to rely less on algorithms and more on direct relationships, picking up the phone to confirm what was actually happening.

Nora Barrows Friedman described that shift toward relationship based verification as a key development of 2025. She spoke about a growing internationalist consciousness, with people connecting the genocide in Palestine to ICE raids, border militarization, stolen Indigenous land, and the expansion of policing and surveillance. She also addressed the pressure campaign aimed at silencing Palestinian solidarity, arguing that smears and intimidation are designed to distract and exhaust. In her view, activists do not have the luxury of disengaging while Palestinians are fighting for their lives, and Zionist propaganda is losing ground as more people recognize it as a political project sustained by censorship and repression.

Kamau Franklin widened the lens further, describing 2025 as a moment when overt white nationalism returned to public life with little resistance from mainstream institutions. He pointed to the nationalization of policing through ICE, FBI raids alongside local law enforcement, and the deployment of federal force as potential rehearsals for election season repression in 2026. He argued that so-called rights evaporated quickly because the system was never designed to protect everyone equally, and tied domestic repression to international escalation, including U.S. actions across the Western Hemisphere. He also critiqued conditions inside Black political spaces, warning that years of counterattack and the elevation of a Black political elite weakened left infrastructure and created openings for reactionary narratives to gain traction.

That critique fed into one of the roundtable’s sharpest themes, capitulation. Davey D framed it as a kind of person of the year, not as weakness but exposure. Who is silent out of fear, and who is silent because they always agreed. Melina Abdullah said the word capitulate became unavoidable after January 2025, as liberal institutions and even Black leadership figures quickly folded to right wing pressure. She stressed that the answer is not despair but deeper organizing rooted in relationships. People checking on one another. People showing up when someone goes quiet. People building networks that cannot be erased by algorithmic suppression.

Nora sharpened that critique of liberal politics, arguing that major Democratic institutions often prefer opposition because it is profitable and comfortable, while offering candidates who concede ground to the right. She pointed to crackdowns on speech around Palestine and described universities, including UC Berkeley, as willing partners in repression rather than reluctant participants. Davey D underscored the contradiction of institutions branding themselves as champions of free speech while cooperating with political targeting and punishment of dissent.

As the show closed, the guests offered clear marching orders for 2026. Melina Abdullah urged listeners to organize, organize, organize, and invited people to join Black Lives Matter Grassroots or any serious local formation, emphasizing that movements grow when people move from spectatorship to participation. Brown Girl Pride encouraged listeners to start at the neighborhood level, meet their neighbors, build community, and connect with organizers and veterans to develop practical defensive strategies, noting that the crisis is already in motion. Nora Barrows Friedman echoed the call to organize while stressing the need to break isolation, get offline, build relationships, ask for help, and avoid burnout. Kamau Franklin defined organizing as collective struggle through real organizations, not individual heroics, and urged people to build alternative institutions and media so communities are not trapped inside corporate narratives.

The roundtable ended the way it began, grounded in camaraderie and accountability. A reminder that politics is not just analysis but relationships. In a year marked by suppression, distortion, and institutional surrender, the guests made clear that the path forward lies in disciplined solidarity, grounded organizing, and building a culture of resistance that does not depend on mainstream permission.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Davey D sits down with award-winning tech journalist Karen Hao to unpack her book Empires of AI—a sweeping critique of how today’s AI boom concentrates power while eroding public agency. Hao traces OpenAI’s arc from a purportedly altruistic nonprofit to a profit-driven juggernaut shaped by the egos and ambitions of its founders. She argues that to evaluate tools like ChatGPT, we can’t stop at personal convenience; we have to reckon with the hidden inputs—mass data scraping from writers and artists, huge land/energy/water demands for data centers, and uneven, sometimes harmful outcomes for users.

Hao and Davey probe how “convenience” morphs into dependency. Hao says many people recognize the hollowing effect of constant engagement and that younger users, in particular, are increasingly skeptical. She describes a “quasi-religion” inside the Valley: AGI believers split into “boomers” (utopia) and “doomers” (apocalypse), both projecting salvation or damnation onto speculative tech. Sam Altman, she contends, deliberately cultivates myth—an “everything machine” that promises to tutor kids, cure loneliness, and fix climate change—pushing beyond Apple-style brand loyalty into messianic claims about intelligence itself.

Davey presses the Apple analogy, and Hao counters that AI’s leap is qualitative: companies market systems as smarter than users while fraying the basic “fair exchange” with the public. She points to research suggesting heavy reliance on chatbots can dull critical-thinking “muscle,” especially worrisome for kids forming habits and worldviews shaped by corporate values baked into models.

The “empire” frame sharpens around labor and extraction. Hao recounts Kenyan workers paid under $2/hour to sanitize training data—absorbing trauma akin to social-media moderation—while generating value that fuels Silicon Valley profits. She echoes Indigenous critics who call data the “last frontier” of colonization: platforms seize what communities create, then sell it back as services.

The conversation lands on politics. With Trump pushing to purge “woke AI,” strip guardrails, and supercharge surveillance, Hao says the mask slips: these systems aren’t neutral; they’re infrastructures that can hard-wire an ideology. Her closing appeal: widen the lens, resist the addictiveness, and organize for public-interest AI—so communities, not empires, set the terms.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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Hard Knock Radio Afrofuturism Round Table

Davey D closed out the year with the show’s annual Afrofuturism round table, bringing together writers, educators, artists, and cultural critics to reflect on what defined Afrofuturism in 2025 and what may shape 2026. The conversation moved fluidly across film, literature, comics, animation, music, artificial intelligence, and cultural ownership, with a clear through line emerging throughout the discussion. Afrofuturism is not just an aesthetic or theory. It is a practice rooted in protection, self determination, and control over Black narratives.

Writer and educator Shawn Taylor opened the conversation by noting that 2025 felt like a turning point where people stopped over explaining Afrofuturism and started actively doing it. He described a growing instinct to protect the culture from dilution and commercialization, something he believes prevented Afrofuturism from being hollowed out the way other cultural movements have been. Taylor pointed to the film Black News Terms and Conditions as one of the year’s most powerful Afrofuturist works, describing it as an experience that left him sitting in awe of Black history, creativity, and endurance. Looking ahead, Taylor shared his anticipation for the next Miles Morales Spider Verse film, arguing animation remains the most authentic space for that character. He also discussed his own upcoming project, Speak and Carry, a solo stage production on grief and mourning supported by a Pop Culture Collaborative grant, underscoring that emotional healing and collective care are also part of imagining Black futures.

Author, poet, radio host, and journalist Jenee Darden centered literature as her primary Afrofuturist anchor in 2025. She highlighted the novel Sky Full of Elephants, describing it as a speculative exploration of what remains when whiteness as an ideology persists even in the absence of white people. Darden connected the book to questions of decolonization, inherited trauma, and long term healing. She also spoke about reading Hawk, a poetry collection by Vivian Ayers, noting Ayers’ visionary imagination and cosmic sensibility. Darden added that Bay Area projects like Co founders stood out for showing how artists are using technology creatively rather than simply talking about it. Looking forward, she expressed excitement about the World Fantasy Convention coming to Oakland and the upcoming Starfleet Academy series, hoping both reflect the region’s creative spirit.

Educator, trainer, and community organizer Constance Rice focused on what she observed at the grassroots level. While she did not point to many long form studio projects, she emphasized the explosion of short form animation and youth driven creativity using AI tools, anime influences, and digital platforms. Rice rejected the idea that screens have diminished imagination, arguing instead that the tools have changed while creativity remains intact. She pointed to a renewed interest in Octavia Butler among younger generations who recognize how closely Butler’s work mirrors the current political and social moment. For Rice, this resurgence signals that young people are actively using speculative thinking to navigate real world crises.

Comics and pop culture analyst Osa Tyehimba brought a deep industry lens to the conversation, explaining that while film studios struggled with direction and backlash, the comic book world continued to move forward. He highlighted expanded representation and stronger storytelling from major publishers alongside a growing ecosystem of independent Black comic creators and manga influenced artists. Tyehimba stressed that the most exciting work is happening where creators control their stories and distribution. When asked to offer advice to younger generations, he was direct. Do not let anyone else tell your stories. He argued that when Black narratives are outsourced, the result is often distortion and erasure, even when intentions appear positive.

Scholar, author, and visual artist Kwadwo Duane Deterville widened the frame by connecting Afrofuturism to global power dynamics. He shared insights from an Afrofuturist symposium linked to Dakar, Senegal, where he presented on artificial intelligence and its implications for Africa and the diaspora. Referencing African Union level discussions around AI strategy, Deterville urged listeners to remain deeply suspicious of how technology is designed, deployed, and controlled. He emphasized that technology reflects the values of its creators and argued that Afrofuturism must interrogate the roots of technological systems, not just their surface aesthetics. He also highlighted Afrofuturist moments in music, including a collaboration between jazz pianist Jason Moran and Detroit techno pioneer Jeff Mills, as examples of Black innovation grounded in lineage and experimentation.

Throughout the conversation, Davey D connected these insights back to questions of ownership and narrative power. He pointed to how outsiders profit from one dimensional stories about Black communities, shaping public perception and policy while extracting cultural value. He urged listeners to study models like Detroit’s electronic music legacy, recommending the documentary God Said Give Em Drum Machines as both inspiration and cautionary tale. For Davey D, Afrofuturism is inseparable from protecting intellectual property, creative process, and cultural memory.

As the discussion closed, the panel offered overlapping guidance for the future. Be mindful of what you consume and who profits from your emotions. Value Black creativity and do not underprice it. Protect community spaces and knowledge through intentional gatekeeping. Question technology at its foundation, not just its output. Davey D distilled it into a final rule for the digital age. Platforms extract. Ownership matters. Protect your methods. Share B level game, not A level game.

Hard Knock Radio heads into 2026 with a familiar but urgent understanding. The future is already being built in books, studios, classrooms, bedrooms, and community spaces. The real question is who controls the tools, who owns the stories, and who benefits from the imagination shaping what comes next.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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In this Hard Knock Radio segment, you and AI expert X. Eyeé walk listeners through the real story of the past year in tech and AI, way beyond the hype about fancy tools and the United States versus China headlines. X explains that California has quietly become the world’s main regulator of AI by passing more than 30 AI related laws, since so many major AI companies are based here or do business here. They break down new laws that criminalize deepfake “undressing” images, protect people’s likeness after death, require government transparency about AI use, and mandate hard to remove watermarks so people can tell when content is AI generated.

X then connects this to Trump’s executive order that tries to block AI regulations and frames it as both an attack on states rights and a gift to tech companies that want to avoid accountability. They explain why self regulation is a myth for profit driven corporations and walk through laws that protect people from AI chatbots that encourage self harm, close loopholes around political deepfakes during elections, and make it easier to sue when AI systems discriminate in hiring, pricing, or housing.

From there, the conversation shifts to data as the new oil. X breaks down why AI cannot function without organic human data, what “model collapse” is, and how companies are quietly harvesting our voices, texts, images, and documents through terms of service, often without real consent or payment. They distinguish between data sets and data centers and unpack how data centers affect energy, water, and frontline communities, including the Memphis facility using methane that is poisoning a nearby Black neighborhood.

X also explains that much of the current environmental strain is temporary because future quantum computers will drastically shrink the hardware needed to run AI. The show closes with a sobering but mobilizing warning. X predicts that by 2026 AI generated images and video will be visually indistinguishable from reality and local personal AI will become common. They argue that 2026 will be a decisive year when communities must step in with local ordinances and organizing to shape how AI is used in schools, workplaces, and everyday life. If people do not act, AI will be used to automate and hard code discrimination and roll back hard won gains, especially for already targeted communities.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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This Hard Knock Radio conversation is a year-in-review on tech and AI, with host Davey D chopping it up with Quency Phillips of Lighthouse Innovation Center and social entrepreneur/author Darian Rodriguez Heyman. They start by framing 2025 as the year AI moved from “wow” to “woven in” – no longer just a flashy search trick but fully integrated into business and everyday tools. Quency points to shifts like OpenAI’s move from nonprofit to for-profit and the growing role of government and big tech in shaping who actually benefits from AI.

Darian breaks down how nonprofits are lagging behind. About half of workers and most nonprofits are using AI in some way, but less than ten percent of organizations have even a basic internal policy. Individual staff might be experimenting with tools, but there’s little organizational strategy, especially while funding is being cut, DEI is under attack, and groups serving communities of color are afraid of becoming targets. He stresses that nonprofits need to see AI as a mission tool for fundraising, marketing, program evaluation, and back-office work, and he highlights sector-specific tools like CauseWriter and Change Agent that bake in stronger values and data protections.

The conversation then turns to power, politics, and weapons. Davey raises the “no woke AI” rhetoric, the lack of federal regulation, and the danger of AI being shaped solely by billionaires and corporations. Quency and Darian talk about AI agents – autonomous bots that can handle multi-step tasks – and the risk of a new divide where only big tech and government can afford the most powerful tools. Davey pushes on data as people power: if platforms are mining communities for profit, what does it look like for organizers, media makers, and nonprofits to own their lists, their relationships, and their narratives, instead of letting tech be the permanent middleman?

They close by offering marching orders for 2026. Quency urges communities to clarify their priorities – from AI tutors for underfunded schools to health equity tools that actually see Black and brown bodies – and to keep asking not just “what can AI do?” but “who is AI doing it for?” Darian reminds listeners that AI is not a future issue, it is right now, and encourages folks to start small, learn the tools, build from their community’s needs, and use AI as a car – powerful and risky, but ultimately a vehicle – rather than surrendering it as a weapon pointed at them.

Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.

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