Albums

For Toca, serious matters had started in 2004, with one of these CD-Rs Cali's indie rap scene was fond of, by these times: a rock and rap crossover record named Dancing with Skeletons. Later on, the band had promised a real album, but it took months, and then years, before anything was released. The group's members, however, were still active. The Ramos brothers, for example, started releasing solo albums. In 2005, the quartet had even proposed one of their tracks to the Project Blowed 10th anniversary album. And in 2006, net31 was supposed to publish the album. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards, this small label had ceased to exist.

The Red Ants have never been top players, in the hip-hop underworld. With their conscious and somber kind of rap, Modulok and Vincent Price were sometimes much too much into darkness. With its martial tone, its banging and noisy beats, its science-fiction imagery, its anti-capitalist stance and the red color of anarchy on the cover art, Phobos Deimos, their first album, had not been the subtlest indie rap album ever. But still, some of its tracks like "Lot’s Wife", "Incendiary Objects" and the great "Future Imperfect", had been particularly efficient and impactful.

"I'm afraid we'll have to innovate..." Such had asserted Dose One in 1999, on "It's Them", one of the most notable tracks of Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop, Anticon's manifesto compilation. And he hadn't said that in vain. As demonstrated with the heavy metal leaning cover art of this first album, it was obvious that Them - later known as Themselves - would not make do with ordinary rap.

The CunninLynguists have been some of these few guys, more or less affiliated to the indie rap movement of the early 2000's, who managed to make it and find a place in the bigger rap community. Those rappers from Kentucky, however, were not too different from their peers; they had followed more or less the same path – an ascending or descending one, depending on the view. Originally a revivalist group, fond of 90's sounding loops and samples, and with an old school rap mindset, they became more contemplative. Over time, their lyrics turned more introspective, their music more cinematic, flirting with folk and rock guitar sounds.

If we need to select a symbol for retro-futurism – this trend consisting in coming back to the past, in order to reinvent the future – this needs to be Edan Portnoy. With his first album, the underground classic Primitive Plus, the rapper, producer and DJ created an improbable musical subgenre: old school hip-hop for the year 3000. He had gone back to rap as it existed in the 80's, and brought it into the new millennium, as if the 90's had never happened. And with his second album, he had returned even further, in the 60's, transferring psychedelic rock to the rap era.