Fake For Real

Rap is no longer the light-hearted music it used to be, a while ago. Neither its conscious side – or what’s left with it – nor the materialistic and violent one, radiate joy and happiness. Even the most hedonistic kind of rap, the one tailored for clubs and dancefloor, is more about debauchery, drug addiction and mental disorders, than about passion for life. Even when it is all about power and success, it smells badly of revenge and competition. And so, when in 2015 Kamaiyah released "How Does it Feel", this single was welcome like some bowl of fresh air.

Lord Narf honors Awful Records, and their collection of weirdos mostly based in Atlanta. She fully complies with the experimental aspirations of this iconoclastic band of rappers. Like them, she is the representative of a new generation for whom rap music is obvious and omnipresent – this young lady said in an interview that it was her parent's music: yes indeed, we are already there – but who don't feel obliged to preserve or elevate it. They don't have any special respect for it. They feel free to change it into anything they have in their little twisted minds.

According to some, Eternia is the best female rapper in Canada. Whatever the truth is, this woman from Ottawa looks exactly as expected, from a Canadian hip-hop artist: she is White, her lyrics are on the conscious and progressive side of the genre, and her sounds are deeply rooted into New-York’s backpacker style. Actually, she has collaborated with underground heroes like the Demigodz, the Atoms Family, or Moodswing 9. Silk-Anne Kaya, also, is a feminist. Her lyrics, as well as her public activities, go into that direction. For example, she launched a campaign named "My Favorite Rapper Wears a Skirt" (including a series of t-shirts bearing this slogan), targeted at the sexist stereotypes her chosen music is full of.

By the end of the noughties, a dance called jerk, or jerkin', became all the rage in the streets of Los Angeles. Soon, it would create its own musical genre, a bit like its Bay Area cousin, hyphy. Though ephemeral, this craze helped putting dance back to the heart of West Coast hip-hop, and prepared the ground for ratchet, another style, popularized later on by the likes of YG and DJ Mustard. Among the bands at the spearhead of jerkin' was Pink Dollaz, a quintet exclusively made of female teenagers, with a taste for sexually explicit lyrics. Like the movement it belonged two, the band was short-lived, but a few years later, twin sisters Cammy and Cee Cee would become visible again, under the names of Cam and China.

The wait was long, before Fatimah Warner's first project, Telefone, was disclosed. Released in 2016 only, it had been heralded three years earlier, when Noname Gypsy – now just Noname – made a name for herself with her contribution to Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap mixtape. Quicker to feature on others' projects than to record her own, she also participated to Mick Jenkins's conceptual – and very strong – The Water(s), and more recently, to Late Knight Special, an album from New-York's rapper and producer Kirk Knight, and to Saba's Bucket List Project.

By 1997, just when some feared that hip-hop was getting corrupted by its own success, "independent" and "alternative" had become buzz words. And no other claimed them louder than Company Flow. A product of New-York's underground, these self-produced and self-promoted rappers had created their own label, Official Recordings, and they targeted the music industry as the main enemy. And their slogan, a very definitive "independent as fuck", was everything but ambiguous.

Prior to this album, Qwel was mostly known as one of the Typical Cats, a rap trio who had helped making Galapagos4 a central label, in Chicago's indie world. His two albums, If It Ain't Been In a Pawn Shop... and The Rubber Duckie Experiment, had also collected praises in the underground. As for Maker, he had authored Honestly, a semi-instrumental record, and produced Seconds Away, another great album recorded jointly with DJ DQ and the rapper Adeem, under the name of Glue.

Lady Leshurr is one of those who, recently, benefited from the grime resurgence. Along with others like Skepta or Stormzy, this British rapper caught the attention of her American peers over the last few months, with her "Queen's Speech" freestyle series. The fourth of them even made it to a Samsung commercial, exposing her to a large audience. And in her recent interviews, she mentioned potential collaborations with US heavyweights like Bangladesh and Timbaland.

Being open to feminine talents was one of the Good Life Café many peculiarities. This scene's best testimony, the Project Blowed compilation, shows this clearly. One of its central tracks, the "Heavyweights Round 2" freestyle, had as many femcees as males. There, Medusa and her cousin Koko – a.k.a. S.I.N. - Nefertiti and T-Love were measuring themselves against Freestyle Fellowship's Mikah 9 and Self Jupiter, Volume 10 and a few others. The record's best song from women, though, was "Don't Get It Twisted". Recorded by Jyant (Ronda Ross) and Eve (Ava DuVernay), a.k.a. the Figures of Speech, it was a perfect sample of the Good Life style, with its erratic and unpredictable music, full of rhythm and flow changes.

By 1999, the excellence of the newly released Operation Doomsday album was not a surprise, to those already familiar with New-York's underground rap scene. By then, MF Doom had already released several great singles on Fondle'em, Bobbito's iconic indie rap label. And all of them were compiled on this opus, recorded by a man who was not exactly a newcomer. The guy, indeed, was Daniel Dumile, a.k.a. Zev Love X, an ex-rapper from the band K.M.D., who had reoriented his career after the death of his colleague and brother Subroc. Moving forward, he would start hiding his face behind a mask, and become rap's underground super-hero.