The Welfare Poets
The Welfare Poets are an Afro-Caribbean hip hop group that began to come into fruition up at Cornell University in the early 1990s, but it wasn't until around 1997 when Ray Ramirez and Hector Rivera were back from college and Dahu Ala was also back home that the group began to perform locally and move towards the recording of a first album. The group has toured the United States, Puerto Rico, South America, across Europe and even part of the arctic circle (Iceland). The group plays Hip Hop with a fusion of (and separately at times) Jazz and various styles from the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, Cuba and Jamaica. The Welfare Poets' music is complemented with lyrical content concerning social, political, economical and ecological issues which has made the group relevant over the years. The band released their first studio album "Project Blues" in June 2000 to critical acclaim and then followed up in 2005 with the genre bending and thought provoking album "Rhymes For Treason" which gave the world "Sak Pase", "Freedom", and "The Media". In 2009 they released a tour de force entitled "Warn Them", an epic 16 song opus which brought the group back to their hip hop roots (first non-band album - just beats)
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