Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers) with Talib Kweli

Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers) and Talib Kweli both make music to make a difference. On their respective new releases American Band and The Seven (Kweli’s EP in collaboration with Styles P), the lyrics directly address social and political issues. The Southern rocker and NYC rapper sat down for the Talkhouse Podcast last month and covered a lot of ground, including: Kweli’s experiences on the ground in Ferguson; Patterson’s desire to provide a visible alternative to white Southern men as bigots in the media; Dave Chappelle’s planning meeting with Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels; Harry Belafonte’s attempt to make a “We Are The World”-style song with rappers for Ferguson; and so much more. Check it out, and subscribe now on iTunes or Stitcher to stay in the loop on future Talkhouse podcasts. — Elia Einhorn, Talkhouse Podcast host and producer. Today’s episode was recorded by Mark Yoshizumi and Patterson Hood, and mixed by Mark Yoshizumi. Want to take action? Talib Kweli recommends: Indivisible.org is a bunch of congressional staffers, people who have worked in Congress who are giving people tools to be anti Trump, whether it’s to participate in a Hill Day or to go to your local town hall and stuff like that. Indivisible.org, they’re doing great, great work. Adopt-A-State is getting people to change the demographic, change the vote in some of the red states so we can change some of the electoral college nonsense. Very important to me is Sleeping Giants. I’m not sure if they have a website but they’re on Facebook and Twitter. Sleeping Giants is a group of people ... taking on Breitbart.com ... They’re going after their advertisers and getting advertisers to pull their ads and money out of Breitbart. That’s a strategy I feel like is working.