Lords of the Underground: A Guide to Underground Hip-Hop

"I get on the mic and I don't stop rappin,'" Oakland's Too $hort proclaimed on his low-tech, hyper-local 1985 debut cassette, and nearly 30 years later, he's outlasted anyone who wanted to get on after him. The long-tail approach has served him well — anyone who tries to distribute their raps independently is nodding in the general direction of the teenage $hort, famous for getting his start by making custom tapes for... his classmates and hawking his wares out of his trunk. His unrepentantly graphic tail-chasing makes him a pioneer as well, though this aspect of the persona only seems more regrettable as the years mount.

Rap had gone viral by the mid '80s, and Miami's 2 Live Crew were among the first to tweak its formulas in perverse, new ways. Their gold-certified debut demonstrated that you didn't need to be dexterous rappers or ace storytellers to move the crowd. Sometimes you just needed to take it a few steps beyond raw, as they did on the frat row shout-along "We Want Some Pussy," the woodpecker funk of... "Get it Girl" or the sinister classic "Throw the 'D'." They would eventually become unlikely champions of the First Amendment, beholden as they were to their own image and profits rather than the hierarchy of a major label.

Aceyalone, Mikah-9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter hailed from Los Angeles's ultra-competitive, late-'80s Good Life/Project Blowed scene, where a weak freestyle or offbeat speed-rap would get you ushered off stage. Their debut album is an absorbing masterpiece that embodies these niche instincts. Where others merely sampled jazz, Freestyle Fellowship tried to embody its forms in their abstract rhymes, scat-like flow and gift for improvisation. Blowed has survived to this day as the longest-running... open mic around, and you can hear traces of their style in everyone from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to Eminem — but not Fat Joe who, as legend has it, was forced to pass the mic.

They make for laughably easy targets — the make-up, the rudimentary shock-raps, the overcommitted fans, "Miracles" — but the outskirts-of-Detroit duo of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are undisputed DIY pioneers. They came of age in the days when two suburban white kids had few prospects in the rap game, so they simply created their own lane. It was certainly an unusual one, influenced by pro wrestling, local acid-rap legend Esham... and the power of circus-as-metaphor. 1994's Ringmaster was their first gold record, a local hit that eventually made the national rounds. Soon, misunderstood kids around the country would be painting their faces, flocking to the annual Clown convention and wondering where they could get some Faygo.

There are better releases if you want to appreciate the unabashedly amped-up gore of Juicy J, DJ Paul and their fellow Memphis shock specialists in song form. But this collection of early, self-released tapes captures the future Oscar winners at their most resourceful, carefully figuring out that sinister, oozing, skin-crawl aesthetic that would become their signature. These tracks are bizarre and atmospheric, whispered or sing-sung raps atop hypnotic beats that imagine what... it would have been like if Wes Craven had preferred a sampler to a movie camera.

As the most visible member of late-'80s legends Ultramagnetic MCs, Kool Keith helped create the blueprint for abstract, space-dusted rap. But as Ultramagnetic became increasingly conformist (by their standards, anyway), Keith sought an oddball route. Alongside Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, Kutmasta Kurt and DJ Q-Bert, he composed Dr. Octagonecologyst, a bizarre ride through time and space with a murderous, free-associative gynecologist. It's a deeply theatrical album, a patchwork of mood and sensation,... the kind of thing that happens when you no longer feel entitled to an audience.

Hip-hop is a culture of self-invention, and there are few examples of self-made men quite as impressive as grassroots hustler Percy Miller. His career charts an alternative map of '90s hip-hop, from the East Bay to New Orleans and every small town in between. He cornered the markets major labels ignored, eventually building a No Limit empire that didn't rely on traditional outlets — TV, radio, magazines — for its expansion. Ice... Cream Man was his first platinum record, and it ushered in the label's golden age. Within a couple years, everyone would recognize those Pen & Pixel covers, the Beats By the Pound funk and P himself, as he parlayed his newfound American dream into straight-to-DVD stardom, a side-gig in professional wrestling and a tryout with the Hornets.

Interesting things can happen when you're just a few steps away from the limelight. Left to their own devices in the drowsy college town of Davis, California, DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker honed their skills and starred in their own, imagined holy wars. The latter two teamed up for Latyrx, a fantastic, meticulously-crafted and deeply personal mission statement for the Solesides (later Quannum) crew. Like the best... collaborations, it was a study in contrasts: Lateef's spry, trickster brags and Lyrics Born's bluesy singsong, old school mic-passing and space-age funk.

If you passed through a Bay Area record shop in the late '90s, there's a good chance a member of the Living Legends tried to sell you one of their tapes. Proof positive that you could travel the world with little more than some perseverance and a suitcase full of CDs, the Legends turned their status as "unsigned and hella broke" into a rallying cry. While their most successful member has proven... to be the enigmatic MURS, the rest of them are worth checking for as well. Among their classic late-1990s releases, the Grouch's Fuck the Dumb (featuring production by Eligh) is, as the title suggests, an immersive chronicle of the mellow Oakland rapper's misanthropic pride.

Getting dropped from a major label has today become a badge of pride, but this wasn't the case when East Bay rappers Del tha Funkee Homosapien (Elektra), Souls of Mischief (Jive) and Casual (Jive) went from "next level" to yesterday's news in the mid '90s. They returned to their hometown Hiero collective (which also featured Pep Love, Domino and Toure) and built an even larger audience on their own. They were early... adopters of the Internet, using their website to sell a dizzying array of crew-branded tees and sweatshirts and forging alliances with skaters, snowboarders and purists with T-1 lines. By the time they released their first crew album, Third Eye Vision, they were probably more famous than they'd ever been.

The late '90s was the heyday for a certain kind of purist: values-driven, anti-crossover, anti-shiny things, New York-centric rappers, and few albums capture this moment quite like Rawkus's Lyricist Lounge compilation. "All commercial cats gettin' murdered," Cipher Complete spits on the appropriately titled "Bring Hip-Hop Back," a sentiment that prevails over the course of this hefty, idealistic collection. As hip-hop went global, retrenchment was in, as evidenced by the diversity of talent... here: poets Sarah Jones and Saul Williams, veterans Kool Keith, Q-Tip and O.C. and then-newcomers Jurassic 5, Mos Def and Company Flow. This was "underground"-as-political stance — though best to forget that Rupert Murdoch's son provided the seed money.

Deep Puddle Dynamics' lone album is a document of youthful desperation. It represents the first meeting of a group of hip-hop pen pals scattered in exceedingly unglamorous locales, convening in Minneapolis for one week and cutting a record together. Doseone and Jel came from Cincinnati, Anticon founders Sole and Alias came from Portland (the one in Maine), and Slug (of Atmosphere and Rhymesayers) hosted. It's a loose, abstract album powered by baroque... beats and wholehearted confessional, obscure in-jokes and their own secret language, the result when hip-hop rewires your brain and compel you to resist its own conventions.

The enduring idea of a hip-hop underground relies on our faith in the entrepreneurial spirit. Nobody wants a boss, and this is part of what compelled El-P to leave Rawkus in the late 1990s and form his own label, Definitive Jux, future home of Aesop Rock, Cage, Mr. Lif, Murs and others. He poured himself into the label's first album, the debut from Harlem rappers Vast Aire and Vordul Mega. The Cold... Vein remains an outlier classic, El-P channeling his inner Eno, and Vast and Vordul looking up from their comic books and imagining their escape from the present might come in the form of teleportation.

All hip-hop is regional: This was the lesson of the early 2000s, as stars throughout the South began making the big cities on the coasts seem quaint and out of touch. The debut from Houston's Paul Wall and Chamillionaire was a sensation throughout the Gulf Coast, thanks to songs like the cartoon-aspirational "Thinkin' Thoed" and the alarmingly catchy "My Money Gets Jealous." The album would earn the charismatic, hungry pair considerable national... interest. Within a few years, major labels would be issuing chopped-and-screwed companions to all their Southern rap albums and Mike Jones's telephone number would be part of the public record.

Sometimes staying underground is a necessity, lest the Secret Service show up at your door. Radicalized by college, then prison, then more college, Immortal Technique remains one of the more outspoken torchbearers of the late-'80s tradition of fiery, political hip-hop. His first album came out days after 9/11; his second was an attempt to reckon with this event and the changes it wrought. Revolutionary Vol. 2, with a guest spot from Mumia... Abu-Jamal, lyrics that catalogued the abuses of power and faith and a CD booklet fantasizing about a violent spree through the White House, remains one of the more chilling, impassioned articles of post-9/11 rage.

The original Native Tongues movement cast a wide influence throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with similarly good-vibed cliques and collectives emerging in Los Angeles (Dilated Peoples, Jurassic 5), Chicago (Kanye and friends), D.C. (Unspoken Heard/Seven Heads) and elsewhere. Little Brother rappers Big Pooh and Phonte and producer 9th Wonder (who named himself after a Digable Planets song) came out of North Carolina's Justus League collective in the early 2000s. Their strong, sample-heavy... debut, The Listening, offered a bridge between the past and the present, giving a new generation of young fans yet another reason to feel nostalgic for an era they never experienced firsthand.

The raucous, rusted metal beats and New Age synths that once characterized El-P's music are par for the course nowadays, and even the pop charts embrace strange, eccentric fare. Yet El's fifth album (and first since the dissolution of Definitive Jux) still carves out a space of total refusal. As expected, it's like the soundtrack to post-World War III reconstruction. But there's a kind of hunger here, a need to survive the... onslaught that these beats represent. On the kling-klang wasteland of "Tougher Colder Killer," El, Killer Mike and Despot sound as though they're rapping for their lives, a B.D.P. horn-blurt their only connection to civilization. It's a record about the cold inhumanity of the present, salvaged by these moments of nostalgic pause. "Full Retard" is a mess of early-'80s stabs, overheated circuit-boards and sparring robots — over the top, a carefully sampled phrase from El's late friend Camu Tao: "You should pump this shit like they do in the future."