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This Amazing Sign Language Interpreter Brought Public Enemy's Music To A Whole New Level

One performance at last year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival was apparently too good to forget.

As the 2015 festival got underway this past weekend, a video from 2014 began making the rounds again. The obvious reason? It’s pretty badass.

American Sign Language interpreter Holly Maniatty helped bring legendary hip hop group Public Enemy’s performance last year to a whole new level:

The sign language interpreter for Public Enemy is one of the best performers at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival today.

Posted by OffBeat Magazine on Friday, April 25, 2014

Maniatty is something of a celeb in the music world, with fans recognizing her from performances at Bonaroo, on Jimmy Kimmel Live and with The Boss himself:

Maniatty, a certified interpreter, has also interpreted for Phish, but she told Vice’s Noisey last year that rap and hip-hop are her niche.

Explaining how she and other ASL interpreters illustrate the flow of rappers, Maniatty told Noisey:

We watch a lot of videos on them performing live. We do a lot of research on where they came from and in the process of that, learning where they move on stage, and how they hold their body, how they hit a beat really hard, or a word of a song really hard, and how they annunciate their body. We do a lot of that and you know a lot of listening to the music and a lot of research where they came from.

H/T Offbeat Magazine

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