Wednesday Night Live: BEHOLD! The Wings of Hip Hop Spaceflight

Harry Allen, known to many as Public Enemy's Media Assassin, is currently the MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT. Harry is coming to the Gantt in honor of Black Music Month to present a talk centered on his Hip-Hop Deep Space Monument (HHDSM) project. This project is an ambitious effort to assemble a time capsule of 50–100 of hip-hop's most transcendent recordings (its masterworks!) curated by artists, experts, and fans. These are the records, as Allen describes them, that could restart the culture if the world were lost. Once assembled, encoded, and ensconced, the goal is to send them on an extrasolar trajectory into deep space. In the talk, he'll explore how he came to this work and what it means for us right now. Harry Allen will be introduced by his MIT colleague and Black Notes Project co-founder Dr. Amy Carleton.

We will also have DJ She’s A+ to provide opening and closing DJ sets for the evening.

About Harry Allen

Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin, has written about race, politics, and popular culture for nearly forty years. As an expert covering hip-hop culture, he has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, on National Public Radio, CNN, the BBC, and other sites.

He is known by many for his long-time association with the iconic band Public Enemy, and for his widely heard “cameo” on their classic record, “Don’t Believe the Hype.”

Allen lectures at colleges and universities around the country, speaking about documentary photos he made of Public Enemy’s members before the band was formed. His talk, Shooting the Enemy, features images that have been shown in numerous documentaries and magazines. Many of them are also now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture‘s permanent collection.

Allen is a 2-time (2017, 2025) Nasir (nuh-SEER) Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University. He is also a 2020 CAST (Center for Arts, Science, and Technology) Visiting Artist at M.I.T., and is currently a 2026 Visiting Scholar in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at M.I.T.

Allen recently founded HARD: Harry Allen R&D, a boutique for developing “singular and outrageous” projects. His debut efforts include harbanger — a turntablist septet he founded at M.I.T. — and the Hip-Hop Deep-Space Monument (HHDSM) — which will propel a music-filled time capsule far from Earth — also undertaken at M.I.T.

Allen lives with his wife, Zakiya, near Washington D.C.

About DJ She’s A+

APRIL N. HARLEY is DJ She’s A+ (IG: @shes_a_plus), a Charlotte native, Howard University alumna, and non-profit executive leader.

The resident monthly DJ every second Friday at the James Beard Award Semi-Finalist lounge Salud Cerveceria, in July 2025, she was the opening DJ for the 116th NAACP National Convention in Charlotte, NC. As the opening plenary DJ, she welcomed and energized just under 1,000 attendees from across the country through her set, joining the production team to transition speakers and panels on and off the stage.

She has served as the national conference DJ for the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Learning Conference, The Center for Black Health and Equity, North Carolina NAACP, and the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits. She has seasonal residencies at local restaurants and breweries, and has played at local listening lounges such as Lorem Ipsum, a venue Esquire Magazine named one of America’s top 15 bars in 2025.

April is also a fundraising consultant who has spent the last 20 years serving as a non-profit and political fundraiser, raising upwards of $15 million for President Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, inaugurations, and nominating conventions from 2007-2012, and speaking on inclusionary fundraising practices at the Association of Fundraising Professionals ICON Global Conference in Toronto, Canada in April 2024. Outside of DJ’ing, she is in non-profit executive leadership and consulting.