The Music Is the Message

At Crenshaw High School, the students boo before Leila Steinberg gets a chance to greet them. When she goes downtown to a group home for troubled teens, they kick aside their chairs and yell, in not so many words, that they aren’t up for any empty talk. At Beverly Hills High, they just yawn.

Steinberg, 40, is used to ruthless adolescent judgment--she faces it weekly as the founder of Assemblies in Motion, a nonprofit organization of hip-hop artists who perform at socially minded assemblies for high schools, detention centers and foster homes. Steinberg confesses that being a white Jewish mother can undermine her image as a force in rap. But she also points out that her fair complexion and last name made helping launch the careers of early hip-hop stars, including Mac Mall and the late Tupac Shakur, possible. “Doors were opened to me [in the record industry] that were still closed to them because they were black.” The kids in the audience sit up a little straighter.

Steinberg grew up in Watts and is herself an artist who once performed with world music greats OJ Ekemode and the Nigerian Allstars. She ultimately decided to focus not on performing, but on raising art out of the inner cities and, then, taking it back in--as education. “We have really failed children in the school system [by undervaluing the arts],” she says, preferring to emulate a time in human history when art was used to educate, to connect, to reform, to vent and to document. “One artist can have more impact on an entire school system than all the academic classes put together, but there are no educators for artists and artists don’t understand that they’re educators.” She believes it is high time to call on today’s performers to be teachers, voices and tools of social change.

To this end, Steinberg, who relocated her family and work to Los Angeles from the Bay Area less than a year ago, runs an ecosystem of projects, including Moses Soul (a record label and film production company), the Microphone Sessions (a raucous Monday night performance workshop) and Assemblies in Motion (the education-oriented top of Steinberg’s food chain).

Benefiting from any cash flowing out of Moses Soul, Assemblies in Motion also pulls the best talent from the open-to-the-public Microphone Sessions, held at legendary Studio 56 in Hollywood, where Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane all recorded soundtracks.

As it happens, the current members of Assemblies in Motion--or AIM, as it is most often called--still attend the workshops, perfecting new pieces in front of the mostly black inner-city adults who are themselves present to work on their own poetry and music. This week, Steinberg, in collaboration with Quincy Jones and his son, Quincy D. Jones III, will see the DVD release of “Thug Angel: The Life of an Outlaw,” a documentary about Shakur, with whom Steinberg worked in the Bay Area’s Microphone Sessions and AIM projects of the ‘80s. Steinberg also was executive producer with Tracy Robinson and Jones III on the film’s soundtrack, to be released in May.

It was as one of the only white kids in ‘70s Watts that Steinberg recalls discerning her privilege. “I always understood that I could very easily get away with anything; the other kids asked me to do things for them, to get people’s attention because they couldn’t.” In the early ‘80s, she and her then-husband Bruce Crawford, a prominent black DJ from Los Angeles, moved to Sonoma, where she found work as the artistic director of the Petaluma Cultural Center. On the side, Steinberg organized her husband’s musical events and concerts.

With her love of world music and his of rap, the duo became well-known in the Bay Area for hosting some of the most rousing concerts of the time, with thousands of revelers trudging in from all over to check out the unusual combination of African, reggae, rap, rock and world music. “We had thousands of kids at the events, so I knew what I could do in terms of bridging cultures and communities and aligning artists.” Pretty soon, she also had the biggest names in hip-hop headlining, including New Kids on the Block, Tone Loc, Digital Underground and Egyptian Lover. But Steinberg always made room on the stage for talented unknowns.

In producing the shows, Steinberg saw the tremendous power and political potential of rap. She set out to create a multicultural performance company that would combine poetry, rap, hip-hop and dance that were also relevant social statements, “so that people would walk away transformed,” she says.

Whether it was her agenda or their own, artists turned out by the hundreds to her weekly tryouts. Word on the street at the time was that if you wanted a record deal, you had to meet this “white girl of hip-hop.” Not only did she produce huge events with big stars, she was rumored to know everyone in the industry, and to be able to get in the doors of record companies. The influx of people desiring a chance on the tryout stage never ebbed, however, and Steinberg realized that it was in itself a movement. Thus began the Microphone Sessions.

A Chance Meeting Leads to a Partnership

Somewhere in the same city, a young artist named Tupac Shakur heard the rumors about Steinberg and set out to find her. But, the afternoon in 1986 that he met her, he was not thinking about music. She was a white woman sitting on the grass outside Bayside Elementary School in Marin County, quietly reading a book about Winnie Mandela, and, Shakur, on a school-time ramble about town, stopped in his tracks to scold her.

“Give me a break,” he said. “What do you know about Winnie Mandela?” Steinberg, who taught an art class at Bayside, said she would be able to tell him something, but not until she’d finished the book. But Shakur, who was a prolific reader, proceeded to grill her--until he was impressed enough by her grasp of black culture to ask for her name. When he learned it, he laughed at destiny. He’d found his mentor.

So, it turns out, had Steinberg. At only 16, Shakur was already celebrated on the street for his explosive and articulate talent. Friends who had seen him perform reported that the boy’s gift for writing and captivating audiences was just what her group needed. Indeed, the evening of their first meeting, Shakur accompanied Steinberg to the Microphone Sessions. Soon after, the two launched AIM, performing at one crammed Bay Area high school assembly after another. As their work with high school audiences progressed, Steinberg distanced herself more and more from the concerts on which she’d worked so hard. Her priority now was AIM--and helping Shakur find his place in the world.

“What made Tupac special was the fact that he put his soul on the record. There are very few artists who give it up like that anymore,” says Jones III. “I think [Steinberg] taught him how to do that, how to not be afraid to say who he was.”

Steinberg’s role in the young artist’s life was pivotal, says Shakur’s mother: “We are all indebted to Leila, Tupac’s first manager and adult friend, for her integrity in looking after the safety of [his] work,” says Afeni Shakur.

When Steinberg recounts the story of how she and Tupac Shakur met, her teen audience at an AIM assembly at Beverly High settle, finally, into their seats. Steinberg laughs, knowing that while the ice is breaking, the kids still aren’t convinced that she can entertain them. “But once I bring my artists out, every one of these kids transforms,” she says. “Whether they’re white, black, in jail or in Malibu, young people respond to music.”

Out slides Kumasi, the handsome black schoolteacher and Islamic fundamentalist who raps in a smooth voice about life in the streets. “I’m a soldier,” he intones, “in the war of life.... Where are the captains? We’re losing men....”

Then, Java, an actor in the recent film “Baby Boy” and the one expected to make it big for his brilliant writing and acting talents. There’s Hope, whose voice stirs goose bumps, and Fatso, who wrote a song about his mother’s crack addiction and his life without a role model. When the kids see Mo, they giggle and point--he plays a character on the television show “Boston Public.” GaKnew, for whom the kids stand up and cheer, closes with a story about forgiving white people for the historical treatment of blacks, and about being an American.

Steinberg was right: The audience is rapt.

At Beverly, students rush the stage to slap hands, hug and get autographs.

At Crenshaw, hecklers are moved to tears.

At a group home for troubled teens, boys stay an extra two hours to talk politics and social issues.

But Steinberg’s theme of music and transformation has been important for the young artists as well as for the teen spectators. As AIM members, GaKnew and the others were culled from the large, regular crowd that attends the Microphone Sessions.

The Microphone Sessions, as the classes became known in the Bay Area because of Steinberg’s mandate to “get up to the stage” and perform, are composed mostly of young African Americans from the inner city. While many are now successful actors, producers and publicists, many more have histories as drug addicts and dealers, gang members and felons. Many tell stories about addicted mothers. Steinberg, who has been a foster parent--officially or informally--to more than 15 kids in the last 10 years, has heard it all, and encourages her artists to write about those experiences. There is no censorship in her sessions, and no rules except honesty.

Discussion About Current Events

On a Monday night at the Microphone Sessions, Steinberg perches on a large speaker near the stage inside Studio 56. She opens the evening with a discussion about current events, and then asks for volunteers to perform. No one moves.

“What’s up, Fatso?” Steinberg calls out. “Come up here, please.”

The young man, who is confident on stage at AIM assemblies, seems suddenly self-conscious. “I don’t got anything tonight, Leila.” He waits with his head down.

“Yes, you do. You’re up. Get up there.” Steinberg points to the stage. The class, reclining in chairs and couches scattered about the room, watches intently.

“Send it!” cries a woman moving into his abandoned hiding place. There is laughter at the familiar blessing.

“I’m Fatso. Fatso Fasano,” he declares, all coolness now. “This is to you, little brother,” he says, nodding to a 16-year-old near Steinberg. The boy has just told the class he’s going to be the father of twins.

Fatso explains that he wrote the song for his friend Hope to sing, but she’s not here tonight. Fatso goes for it himself, but Steinberg stops him and sends another artist, Molly, to the stage. Although she has never seen the lyrics, she leans in, her voice wavering at first and then rising, booming out into the room.

Fatso and other AIM members often attend both the Microphone Sessions and once- or twice-weekly assemblies, work Steinberg considers crucial to the artists’--and society’s--growth.

“They want to be stars, of course,” she says of her artists. They know she can help them with record deals when the time comes, but her plan is to make sure they are giving back to the community before then.

Fatso, a former hustler, says that “working with Leila inspired me to make a difference and help change the world, to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.”

Being socially responsible isn’t always financially easy. It costs money to put on AIM assemblies, even though the artists perform free. To keep AIM going, Steinberg pours money earned from Moses Soul into her workshops and the early careers of her artists. Additionally, Paul Schwartz donates the use of Studio 56 because, he says, he believes in the art that springs from the sessions.

At the end of her high school assemblies, Steinberg usually opens a forum for free discussion--about race, political issues and society. For a person to be truly powerful, she says, as an artist or otherwise, she must be articulate, well-read and understand the strength and meaning of what she is saying. “The more you look at [history] through the music of the times, the more you understand what was going on. Textbooks tell us what the government thought. Music tells us about the people.”

Steinberg talks of a final and important lesson--ironically, one Shakur never learned before his death in Las Vegas in 1996: the need for artists to believe in the power of their words.

“Pac talked a lot about death in his songs,” she recalls. “A lot of people believed that he was foreseeing his death rather than creating it.” His words had power that he didn’t respect, she says. “Pac wrote himself out of his script. He didn’t understand the real power of what he was saying.”