The wonderful aspect of a true and living sub-culture as opposed to one just manufactured by capitalist based materialism, is there's so many sediments and layers to the true and living sub-culture. I'm currently involved in helping with organizing a local community hip hop festival, and as part of it last year, they had a panel talk discussing the history of hip hop shows and groups and endeavors locally. It was amazing to watch that, and piece together the history of this one small southern city's hip hop. It's like that everywhere too - an art form (always with the dream of becoming business) where all these people, at generations level now, got to express themselves in this thing that blossomed from the South Bronx in the 1970s. Shit man, writing raps and freestyling carried me through the '80s as a rural kid, and in retrospect it's amazing to me that little ass Farmville, Virginia, had an AM radio station that played hip hop back then, which a lot of cities didn't even have. It's amazing that the club which had been Ernie's Disco, owned by my first grade teacher's husband, which we took a field trip to back in the day, just to dance and shit. Fevers has seen a ton of touring acts come through over the years, and has a pretty crazy reputation, but fuck it you know, people need places to go.
With all that in mind - the layers and sediments of hip hop culture - it's crazy to think of all the legends, absolute geniuses who exist in these tendrils of that culture, who are probably hardly known at mainstream level. J-Live is one such legend, just a beast of a lyricist and MC, and also public school teacher in Washington, DC (last I knew). I go through lyricist fetish periods, as all semi-educated white males who love hip hop tend towards (lol), and whenever that happens, J-Live usually pops up. An absolute legend, whether people know of him or not.
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