The North to Shore music and arts festival is heading to Brick City for its final week. Festivalgoers can expect acts like Kevin Hart and Stephen Colbert, as well as rapper and Newark native Rashia Fisher - better known as “Rah Digga” – to perform.
Fisher will be bringing her nonprofit foundation Lyrics Matter to the North to Shore Festival for its inaugural event “The Salon Series.”
"I’m happy that my foundation is actually able to participate. Been doing it for a while just for a passion project purpose,” Fisher says.
The Lyrics Matter Foundation, established in 2015, was Fisher’s way of giving back to her community by collaborating with local schools particularly in underserved communities to reach young people through arts education.
"This would be something cool to do for future generations of artists passing the torch, and just giving them something to do there’s no music programs in the schools anymore,” she says.
The program garnered success locally and recently on an international scale, bringing her curriculum to Taiwan.
"It goes a little deeper than just learning how to write a rhyme. It encompasses getting kids to put the screens down and use more of their brain,” the rapper says.
“Lyrics Matter: The Salon Series” will be a conversation with music producer Just Blaze about hip hop and the next 50 years of the genre.
"Hip Hop is a culture, and we have to value it as such, in order for other people to value it the same way,” says Fisher.