Hip-Hop Below the Mainstream

The golden age of hip-hop is at least a decade in the past, a time when the most artistically ambitious music--by performers such as Public Enemy, Eric B. and Rakim, De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest--was also the most commercially successful.

In the years since, the corrupting influx of money has turned much of mainstream hip-hop into a marketing formula. The music is overpopulated with characters posing as gangsters, pimps and prostitutes, whose subject matter is a fantasy and whose videos are essentially advertisements for the conspicuous consumption of sex, cars and champagne.

But beneath the mainstream radar, creativity in hip-hop is thriving, and it’s beginning to show signs of breaking through to a wider audience. In the last year, formerly underground artists such as Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Common have had gold or platinum albums filled with high-minded lyrics and inventive music.

In recent weeks, their legacy has been expanded by San Francisco-based rapper Mystic, who has won acclaim for her extraordinary debut album, “Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom” (GoodVibe), and New York’s Cannibal Ox, which has scored an underground hit with its inventive full-length bow, “The Cold Vein” (Def Jux).

In addition, Cannibal Ox is currently on a major national tour that will showcase the rosters of two of the nation’s most respected underground hip-hop labels, Def Jux from New York and Rhyme Sayers in Minneapolis, and adventurous rappers such as Atmosphere, Eyedea & Abilities, Aesop Rock, Mr. Lif and El-P. The tour comes to Spaceland in Silver Lake tonight and the Knitting Factory Hollywood on Saturday afternoon.

For these artists, there is nothing particularly esoteric or “underground” about their music. On the contrary, their approach is based on hip-hop tradition, where a rapper’s rhyme schemes, verbal flow and linguistic command separate the masters from the pretenders.

“The industry is so blatantly about money that it has become totally exploitative,” says Mystic, a 27-year-old poet and thespian who spent several years working with funky rap jesters Digital Underground before branching off into a solo career. “There used to be rules, per se, in hip-hop, and I don’t know that they exist anymore in the mainstream. But they exist in the underground, and they demand originality, bringing new things to the table, pushing the boundaries.”

“Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom” does exactly that on tracks such as “Fatherless Child,” which addresses the death of Mystic’s father from a heroin overdose and ponders the turns her life might have taken if he had been a bigger presence in her childhood.

“I look at ‘alternative’ as meaning an alternative to everything else that is going on in mainstream hip-hop, but I still think what I do is really accessible,” she says. “It’s about regular everyday life and struggle and growth. In a lot of ways, I’m the regular chick on the block, representing real people and their struggles.

“Hip-hop started off as this voice of oppressed people, and it was railing against the 1% of society that had all the money and control. But now a lot of rappers have gotten money, and they’re part of the cycle, while nothing has changed all that much in the communities. There are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed, and that’s where albums like mine come in.”

The attitude is similar on Cannibal Ox’s “The Cold Vein.” Whereas Mystic’s album has the deceptively easygoing flow and sing-along melodicism of a Sade after-hours session, “The Cold Vein” suggests the soundtrack for one of Philip K. Dick’s futuristic sci-fi novels.

Yet the album is grounded in the harsh realities of the urban environment; the title was literally a vision from above, says Cannibal Ox rapper Vast, who saw an image of New York from an airplane in a snowstorm, the alleys and streets crisscrossing the white blanket like surreal blood vessels.

“The vein represents the paths traveled, and the cold is the temperature of our surroundings--whether it’s poverty or drug abuse or guns,” Vast says. “It’s harsh, it’s cold, it’s death.”

The album more than lives up to that premise, a latticework of disorienting sound vistas and lopsided beats carved out by one of the masters of the hip-hop underground, former Company Flow mastermind El-P, who along with the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA has done more than any other producer to push the musical vocabulary of hip-hop forward in the last five years. Over this bleak yet intriguing backdrop, Vast and Vordul Megilah trade rhymes in which their childhoods in Harlem become fuel for stories full of bedlam, comedy, pathos and bravado.

“I went through the average negatives of ghetto life growing up,” Vast says. “I came up in a lower-middle-class family, single-parent household, three toddlers, and hip-hop became a habit, then a passion, and then it was like therapy. Now I can’t imagine myself not making a rhyme.”

On “The Cold Vein,” the rhymes flow and the beats unwind to create one of the most intriguing hip-hop releases in recent years. “We crave other worlds,” says Vast, citing the influence of movies such as “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” and the cartoon art of Stan Lee. “The one in front of us isn’t enough sometimes.”

For many of these hip-hop idealists, the story is similar: rap as a way to forging a world that, if not necessarily better than the one they currently occupy, is at least different. Eyedea found his identity through the power of rhyme.

“I was into hip-hop for the rebellion, until I heard Del tha Funkee Homosapien and it created a doorway into a different kind of rhyming,” Eyedea recalls. “His patterns, his multisyllabic schemes, the mind-blowing way he would pile up phrases that didn’t scan on paper but somehow worked when you heard him rap--everything took on a whole new dimension for me. That’s when I saw rap as something more than a hobby, but as an art form, a craft that I needed to develop and improve.”

The desire to “show and prove”--to eclipse rivals real and imagined with a display of imagination, wordplay and inventiveness--is what once made hip-hop great. In the underground, that spirit still burns.

“We may remain underground because there is a certain fog that hovers above abstract art, a myth that it just won’t sell,” says Vast of Cannibal Ox. “But groups like OutKast and A Tribe Called Quest have proven that idea wrong. It’s about good music.... There is incredible stuff out now. Hip-hop is still growing and improving. You just gotta look for it.”

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The Who Killed the Robots Tour with Cannibal Ox and others, tonight at Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., L.A., 9 p.m. $18. (213) 833-2843. Also Saturday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., L.A., 2 p.m. $15. (323) 463-0204.

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Greg Kot is rock critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.