Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [68]
At the same time that hip-hop dominated late-nineties pop music with diamonds, parties, and accessible dance-floor anthems, independent record labels such as Rawkus and Quannum fostered an alternative to this overt materialism: back-to-basics innovation. Rap fans gravitated to their artists’ simple, decidedly low-fidelity production aesthetics and diverse sensibilities. There is the raw, rugged stomp of Pharoahe Monch, who scored a hit in 1999 with “Simon Says,” to the versatile, soulful production and remix work of DJ Spinna. Rawkus and the “backpacker scene” (dubbed for the casual, no-frills backpack, sweatshirt and baseball hat attire that was typical of the fans and artists) were the antithesis to Bentleys and Cristal, an alternative that in 1999 and 2000 seemed on the verge of changing millennial hip-hop. In New York, Rawkus Records dominated the East Coast wing of the scene on the strength of a string of influential releases. Rawkus was a struggling label with no clear identity until it signed Company Flow, a three-man rap collective from Queens. Backed by the production work of El-P, short for El-Producto (born Jaime Meline), Company Flow revitalized the hip-hop underground with a series of twelve-inch releases, starting in 1992. Their dense abstract lyrics, irregular yet funky beats, and spacey ambiance brought an experimentalism back to the genre that in 2002 made its way into the mainstream, echoed in the herky-jerky syncopation of songs such as Missy Elliott’s “Work It.” But in 1995, the members of Company Flow worked day jobs to fund an EP on double vinyl, Funcrusher (1996), which sold a successful thirty thousand copies. The group was soon courted by several record labels, but the fledgling Rawkus was the only one to accept their demands: Company Flow maintained ownership of their recordings, received 50 percent of the net royalties, and were not tied to a multialbum contract. Company Flow kept their freedom, Rawkus earned credibility. The label signed Mos Def (born Dante Terrell Smith), Talib Kweli (born Talib Greene), and Cincinnati, Ohio’s Hi-Tek (born Tony Cottrell) as the collaborative Black Star in 1997, a trio that preached a halt to the negativity in rap by echoing the self-awareness and freedom of mind in the teachings of legendary black activist Marcus Garvey. Black Star similarly harped on Afrocentric unity, resonating the style and consciousness of the Native Tongues collective in the eighties. When Black Star’s eponymous debut was released in 1998, they were lauded by critics and fans as the next coming of hip-hop.
I’m on a mission and my mission won’t stop: Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre in 1993.
On the West Coast, a group of artists, most of whom met at the student radio station of the University of California at Davis, formed the Solesides-Quannum collective. Solesides began as DJ Shadow (Josh Davis), Blackalicious (includes Gift of Gab, a.k.a. T. J. Parker, and Chief Xcel, born Xavier Mosley), Lateef the Truth Speaker (Lateef Daumont), and Lyrics Born (Tom Shimura); Lateef and Lyrics Born also recorded as Latyrx. The Solesides crew, like some of the bright lights in the Rawkus family, were a mix of a fractured, funky, stream-of-consciousness aesthetics and rich, old-school rap. Through the nineties, first on Solesides Records, then on Quannum Projects, these artists made eclectic, quality rap music that, like that of their East Coast counterparts in Company Flow, did not catch on until the decade headed to a close.
At the time, artists on labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy Records would sell a million records