It is midnight on a Sunday in Philadelphia. It can't be more than 30 degrees outside, but Sticman and M-1 are outside with their jackets off, posing for Mugshots magazine. They have just finished a concert, but the two vogue for the camera, clearly practiced at it, punching, kicking and jumping. "It's cold as a motherfucker!" Sticman screams at one point, "anything for the struggle!" The two rappers, who together form the incendiary hip-hop group Dead Prez, look anything but the image of rappers on MTV, stuck in the dingy alley behind the Theater of the Living Arts, their only jewelry the red, black and green wristbands that M-1 wears. A few people mill around, activists invited backstage by Sticman, who has angered the club's bouncers by inviting anyone who wanted to talk back. The shoot finally over, the two put on their jackets and pound on the back doors to the club, which are locked. "Yo, is this the door we came out of?" M-1, looking over his shoulder, shouts to Stic. Stic turns to me. "You got a tape recorder? Let's walk and talk." Dead Prez was in Philly that night on the Lyricist Lounge tour, going around the country with Tahir, Killer Mike and a rotating cast of locals in each city. They are touring behind Turn Off the Radio, their new album that is not an album, but a mixtape, the follow up to their 2000 debut, Let's Get Free. "It's a mixtape, like, pow!" says Sticman. "It's some hood shit. Shit, like, just takeovers, like we be doing that all the time, just sitting around all the time, changing the words singing Billie Jean and flippin' your shit around." Stopped for a moment in the lobby of the theater, he breaks into song, mimicking Billie Jean. "And we was like, boom! Let's do that. Hip hop shit." The mixtape is just that, takeovers of classic hip-hop songs like Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy," with revolutionary lyrics adapted onto them. "It was all a dream, started organizing in my late teens, Huey P. and Malcolm X who I wanna be..." That revolutionary political philosophy is not just the mantra of the band -- it is the driving force behind it. M-1 and Sticman formed Dead Prez while they were organizing for the Uhuru movement, a black nationalist party. Since then, they have worked to bring a political education to the masses, always infusing their lyrics with their politics. It is a move that has kept them off MTV and the radio, but they persevere. "What we relating," says Sticman, as he is hustled out to a waiting van, "is education. We say fuck they schools, and let's get a real education. We got love in the hood, know what I mean? We the poor people. When we speak, we are the masses. They tryin' to reach the masses. We are the masses"

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