Maybe I missed the official announcement, but when did Chicago, a city once known pretty much solely for Common and Twista, become one of the de-facto go-to cities for cutting-edge Hip-Hop? I mean, I never had anything against Chicago per-se. I bought Can I Borrow a Dollar? and Runnin’ Off at Da Mouth when they came out like a good little open-minded hip-hopper. But as a dyed-in-the-wool East Coast head who’s long reveled in New York’s dominance of the art-form, while enjoying the occasional dalliance with West Coast and Southern artists, the sudden rise in prominence of other regions like the Midwest, and Chicago in particular, gives me reason to pause.
The swift and incontrovertible relevance of the Windy City is distinctly perceptible when I look back over 2007 and note that some of the most successful artists in the genre, not to mention numerous lesser-known acts who’ve found their way onto my playlists, into my blogs and in-turn onto my “personal favorites” list, or otherwise made a name for themselves this year, all originated there. I’m talking about artists like Common, Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Serengeti, Hi Fidel, Uncut Raw, Kid Sister, Cool Kids, Juba Dance, and City Slick, who dominated my day-to-day listening habits, my DJ sets and my year-end “Best Of” list, and in many cases found their way into the headphones and hearts of other listeners and music fans across the country and around the globe.
As I admired this uniquely Chicagoan ascendancy to the top of the Hip-Hop pile I remembered a time, between Com’s Like Water for Chocolate and Ye’s “Through the Wire,” when my intake of Chicago-bred Rap consisted mostly of releases from the Galapagos 4 label and their contemporaries (shout-out to Overflo, EV Productions, and All Natural Inc.) on the city’s indieground scene. The prime mover from the G4 posse was a Filipino-American emcee named Offwhyte (an ironic nod to his birth in Pell City, Alabama im 1977, a time and place where there were only two racial classifications offered on birth certificates, black, and white… with his being marked “white”) whose debut LP Squints introduced him as a complex lyricist (rhyming about the everyday-mundane from beneath a virtual avalanche of syllables) with a fiery personality and a calm, monotone delivery reminiscent of Juggaknots front-man Breezly Brewin’ and Company Flow’s El-P & Bigg Jus. And while he apparently splits his time between the Chi and Southern California these days not much else has changed, so it makes perfect sense that he’d join the current Chicago renaissance by releasing Mainstay, his third studio album and first in five years, late last year.
The album’s title track, “Mainstay (Rain or Shine),” addresses his Chicago origins and current Los Angeles residency in appropriately poetic terminology over a track that blends laid back bass, guitars, horns and woodwinds that sound like a Jazz cover of a Spaghetti Western theme-song, some electronic beeps and dusty drum programming.
“Mainstay (Rain or Shine)”
-El Keter
