Albums

With hindsight, we know now that there was one single criterion, to assess the quality of a Living Legends record: the level of involvement of Eligh. The Californian collective's best albums, indeed, were those where he took the most active part. It was true for his solo albums, as well as Luckyiam.PSC's great Justify the Mean$ (2002). And it was true, also, for the first and last album ever released by the 3 Melancholy Gypsys, one of the two funding trios of the Legends.

Since 2007 and his last album, Tinfoil on the Windows, we all thought that soso had disappeared with his label, Clothes Horse. Sure, in 2009, he had released a joint album with DJ Kutdown, All They Found was Water at the Bottom of the Sea. But this was an instrumental record, available only through a very specialized Japanese label, Hue Records. In 2013, however, soso was still alive. As other key artists of the indie rap movement, he had found an asylum in one of the few labels making their best to keep this scene alive, Scott Da Ros's Endemik Music.

Judging by the small hype, by the end of the 90's, about Halifax's so-called bold and visionary hip-hop underground, it is surprising to realize that one of the pioneer albums of this scene was not so revolutionary. As most indie rap artists of the times, these were still loyal to New-York's boom bap. It would be only a few months or years later, with the experimentations of the Sebutones, Knowself and Recyclone, that some other Nova Scotia rappers would move to something else.

At first glance, Misguided Recordings didn't look too sexy, with its ugly cover art, its heavy introduction, its tasteless old-school sounding first song ("The Cage") and the painful voice of its rapper, a White guy from the obscure scene of Madison, Wisconsin, one half of a very anecdotic duo, The Crest. But then, starting with its second track, the record was getting significantly more exciting.

By the beginning of the 2000's, Disflex6, a veteran hip-hop band from the Bay Area underground, was supposed to be granted with a second life, thanks to England's Lex Records. By the same time as they were working on their first album for this label, Robot Dreams (an album others would finally release…), however, the group's members were pursuing their own careers. Elon.is, for example, one of the sextet's producers, proposed by the end of 2002 his third solo opus.

Though they caused a sensation with it, the Styles of Beyond were not complete newcomers by the time they released their 2000 Fold album, in 1998. The year before, Ryu (the White guy) and Takbir (the Black one) had already been designated Best New Artists by the Wake up Show. And those friends of Mike Shinoda, the future star of Linkin Park, were also protégés of Divine Styler, who produced some tracks and designed the cover art of their first album, this connection being due to the fact that Tak's big brother, Bilal Bashir, had been Divine Styler's beatmaker and, like him, a member of Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate.