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Within seconds of beginning our interview by phone, Def Jux rapper Murs has interrupted my questions to ask where I’m from (I have an accent). When I tell him, he says he’s surprised I even listen to hip-hop. “Hip-hop’s not that important—it’s just entertainment.” I tell him Tupac’s face is one of the more common images on T-shirts and walls in Africa (where I’m from) and he seems to accept...
Formerly of the Living Legends crew, currently on the cutting edge Def Jux label and aspiring Harvard student, Murs is finally starting to break it big after many years on the West Coast underground. Def Jux has become the hip-hop label to watch thanks to the careful management of rapper and CEO El-P, the Jay-Z of the underground. Jukies always appear on each other’s albums, and the tours become traveling carnivals of talent dominated by the Jukies themselves, but with a healthy accumulation of friends and guests to round things out. In fact...
Murs points out that few hip-hop albums have a single producer the whole way through. “Like when Rick Rubin produces the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then it’s a Rick Rubin album. I like that. Lyrically, I’m all over the place as well, so the production helps unify the album.” Murs’ Def Jux debut was a who’s who of underground producers, featuring El-P, Ant, RJD2 and Blockhead on songs that veered from battle raps to narratives and back...
...piece with the mainstream soul-sampling work of Kanye West. The album’s ten tracks are surprisingly short and direct as well—one gets the impression that a lot was cut to trim the album to its best elements. The subject material is straightforward hip-hop turf: hustling, guns and women, all delivered with Murs slight twist. “H.U.S.T.L.E.” describes the challenge of making his way in the rap game; he pays an ambivalent tribute to gansta culture on “Walk Like A Man” and protests...
Stills’ candidate of choice, on the other hand, recently professed his fascination with hip-hop music (“There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it,” Kerry told an MTV reporter in March, “and I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important”), and is known to have played bass with prep-school surf band The Electras. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Kerry was taking classical guitar lessons...