Without warning, I got into a hip hop thing. There's a lot of indie hip hop activity in my city, and I decided to check out what some of them are recording. I had already been familiar with P.O.S., being [formerly] two degrees of separation from him, and I listened to Atmosphere's You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having and Brother Ali's Shadows on the Sun. I'm not sure if Atmosphere is quite my thing, but I really like some of SotS, especially the opening track and Forest Whitiker [sic]. From other parts of the country, I heard Platinum Pied Pipers' Triple P [listen to Lights Out], Eyedea & Abilities' First Born, and Ohmega Watts' The Find. Listen to Ohmega Watts, even if you don't like hip hop, or even music. Don't even think about it, just make it happen.

Just like when I first intentionally started listening to jazz, eighty-nine years ago, my initial experience was limited to a single artist, and in this case it was MF Doom. I picked up Mm..Food? [on our local Rhymesayers label] in 2004, after hearing Vomitspit on Radio K, and that track [and artist] are still in my wide rotation, along with some of the other projects he worked on: Madvillain's Madvillainy and Danger Doom's The Mouse and the Mask. I love Doom's voice and some of his beats, but his overall tone is too whimsical to be completely to my liking, so it great to get into artists like, say, Ohmega Watts. I've also been listening to Yesterdays New Quintet's Angles Without Edges, a mostly-instrumental collision of hip hop and jazz sensibilities, and J Dilla/Jay Dee's posthumously-released Donuts, though I'm not sure I fully understand or appreciate this last one; it seems to move too quickly between ideas to allow any of them become established.