Little Brother – The Listeningįor many, The Listening could be considered one of the most groundbreaking underground Hip Hop records of the modern era. A bit of jazzy ultra-violence in a squeaky ass voice never felt so good. The lost thoughts of a rambling stairwell dweller, or the undine styled under-thoughts of a producer living in a basement studio, Lord Quas was our one and only pleasure of pure id. Madness is the pleasure of the unseen, and Madlib’s pig-nosed hippo with the brick is everyone’s unseen. Looking deeper into Busdriver’s mind, themes on gun violence and major labels complications among others give a feeling of something deeper. The Project Blowed member’s debut was full of the most humorous and mind numbing free-associative rhymes one will ever hear. Those who didn’t clamor for radio play or acceptance. More importantly, the “underground” lives forever, because it represented artists who weren’t afraid of topics and structures and sounds normally left off the table at A&R meetings. All the while crate digging and hitting shows outside of the know of many.
Later on it became about blogspots and now defunct forums where people shared music and thumbed their noses at those who weren’t in the know. In the early 2000s, it was about hitting the record shops and being part of the scene, supporting your favorite artists that didn’t have a major label machine behind them.
But, for us, these were the albums that set themselves apart. We also know that people will feel as though we left some of their favorite albums off this list, and for that we’d like to say to feel free to drop your own list in the comment section. Of course, also, we are only considering albums made since the Y2K scare. We know that more still will find a difference between those two and “indie.” And we know that can go on ad-nauseum because the “underground” is something different, maybe, to everyone.
And we know that, for some people, there will be a difference between “underground” and “alternative” Hip Hop. We know that many people hate the moniker “underground,” and that it sometimes feels demeaning to artists. No albums by the artist after they went mainstream. Over-caffeinated nut-jobs horsing around, playing obscurities from across the globe and pointless banter about the sorry state of contemporary American popular culture.First things first, we’ll start with what we disqualified.
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