Gift of Gab’s debut solo disc, 4th Dimensional Rocket Ships Going Up, is impressive. Gab, who is best known as one half of the Bay Area-based rap group Blackalicious, doesn’t stray far from his crew’s oeuvre on the new record, however, which begs the question: What’s the point of a…

Jadakiss has something to prove; his reputation as a fierce lyricist has yet to translate into platinum record sales. On his sophomore release, Jada swings for the fences in hopes of showing that he is worthy of Jay-Z-like stats. And although he hits plenty out of the park, he whiffs…

We’re young, we’re black, and we got some gangsta-ass music,” asserts Prodigy, one half of the New York-based crew Mobb Deep, telling why America should still fear this Mobb. “And we got fans.” Prodigy and his cohort Havoc, poets from the Queensbridge Projects, earned those fans by chronicling the grimy…

I think there is so much that can be done with samples, but fewer people are making an effort to raise the bar,” says DJ Shadow via phone from somewhere in the Midwest. “So it just makes the evolution of the sound slower.” Even though the art of sampling seems…

It is an honor and a privilege of mine to say ‘Fuck you, Clear Channel,'” says Sage Francis, the Rhode Island-based rapper/spoken-word artist, as he prepares to embark on a national tour that he brazenly calls the Fuck Clear Channel Tour. “Clear Channel is a company that likes to bully…

If you ask the three members of the Procussions what’s missing from today’s hip-hop, they’ll tell you straight up: substance. “Everything seems to be really stale,” says MC Resonant, who pulls double duty as DJ for the Colorado Springs-turned-L.A.-based hip-hop combo. “If you’re not a super battle-rhymer, then you’re a…

Aesop Rock is the self-deprecating antihero of indie rap. Amazed that anyone has taken an interest in his music, Aesop, who was born Ian Bavitz on Long Island in 1976, isn’t out to save rap; he’s content just carving out a little niche for himself and his friends at his…

Hip-hop is everything that surrounds us,” declares Selecta Roswell (aka Sean Ryerson), whose pseudonym references the infamous New Mexico town where a flying saucer allegedly crashed in 1947. “And if some gray aliens leak out of my head and onto my computer, they are just as hip-hop as Ol’ Dirty…

For years, Me’Shell NdegéOcello (her surname means “free as a bird” in Swahili) has consistently produced a prodigious amount of seductive, sensual and, at times, subversive soul music that has never translated into multi-platinum record sales. And despite several Grammy nominations and a plethora of critical accolades, the closest she’s…

The Procussions, a three-man hip-hop crew consisting of Colorado Springs natives Mr. J, Resonant and Stro the 89th Key, are about to break out massive with a debut full-length, Iron Sharpens Iron, slated for release this fall on the indie imprint Basementalism records. According to Adict, label head and former…

Hip-hop like it used to be in 1985, 1988 — the golden years of hip-hop — that’s gone,” says MC Iomos Marad. “All of that is over.” Rather than lamenting that fact, however, the Chicago-based, seven-piece Family Tree is planting seedlings culled from the collective gospels of Rakim, Public Enemy…

MURS, a card-carrying member of the Cali-centric rap crew Living Legends, just released his third record, titled The End of the Beginning. Meanwhile, a recent bacchanalian binge in the city Bugsy Siegel built almost spelled the beginning of the end of his still-burgeoning career. “I had a wild night in…

When the members of Denver’s Hilltop Klick get together with their friends in the National Blues Arsenal, they channel the spirit of Robert Johnson as much as they do any spitfire hip-hop MC. The three-piece Arsenal provides a riff-heavy, Delta-blues backbeat to the Klick’s gritty street-smart sound, creating rap music…

Portland, Maine, doesn’t quite carry the street cred of, say, Compton. But Sole, who came of age as a rapper in the beatific Eastern state, isn’t worried about the geographical connotations of his home town. The battle scars he received in this burg, which he describes as “cold and unforgiving,”…

Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, in one of the poorer regions of the nation, Donnie Eden knew what it was like to be an at-risk child before the label even existed. “I came up being the oldest ,” he says. “We had to scrape by till we were old enough…

Sacrifice’s second full-length, Slangin’ Keyz, is a potent dose of gritty rap that profiles the struggles of fatherless children and incarcerated scarfaces. A Montbello native also known as Shawn Brown, Sacrifice pushes pure lyrical dope on tracks like “Mo Jail & No Bail,” in which he describes the tribulations of…

In the tradition of politically and socially conscious artists such as Public Enemy and Dead Prez, the talented group of vocalists, producers and rhyme-sayers (F.I.S.K., WhizM, Taughfeek, Pirahana Jones, Nafia, Shiek and Clymaxx) on this local compilation affiliate themselves with the Seerz Movement. Put together by DJ F.I.S.K. and the…

It’s been five years since Gang Starr released a new album — practically an ice age in hip-hop. Guru and DJ Premier know a lot has changed, but if they’re worried, they’re not letting on: They no longer have to step into the battle arena to earn their rep, because…

DJ Vadim takes pride in exporting the revolutionary idea that hip-hop knows no borders. Like a musical Karl Marx, the British turntablist gained his street knowledge from the polyglot culture of London, where a new vanguard of B-boys breakdance and play music in the city’s subterranean Tube system and its…

Bad Brains — rechristened in the late ’90s as Soul Brains to reflect a more positive vibe — has long been one of the most innovative bands to rock the planet. Influencing everyone from the Beastie Boys to Mos Def, the band burst out of the D.C. punk scene in…

Def Jux Records now delivers what Rawkus did in the late ’90s: daring, experimental, raw hip-hop. Anchored by label founder El-P’s futuristic vision of symphonic paranoia, Def Jux has introduced rap audiences to an impressive crew of East Coast-based artists, including Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox. Four-time Boston Music Awards…

Cody ChesnuTT is an anomaly, but he shouldn’t be: He plays rock and roll and can righteously wail on a guitar, one of many such artists to arise since black musicians essentially invented the genre more than fifty years ago. Yet when the Atlanta-bred, Los Angeles-based ChesnuTT steps on stage…