Highlight – Aceyalone

Highlight

Aceyalone is a popular West Coast underground rapper with an impressive discography list. To date, he’s released 8 albums, a few independently, but most along with the Freestyle Fellowship, a collective he helped found, and Haiku D’Etat, a popular group with a slightly more poetic bearing. Freestyle Fellowship, as the name implies, focuses on freestyle rapping, as well as fusing jazz, “standard” hip-hop, and the concept of Afrocentrism. They frequently fronted many favorite MC’s in rap battles. Several of the MC’s with Aceyalone rapped in Haiku D’Etat, too, and released two labels. Both D’Etat and Freestyle merged into the super-collective and crew Project Blowed (official site bio, Wikipedia article) which has fundamentally replaced the famous Good Life Health Food Centre’s (for more info, see the The Good Life section) open-mic night with its own, somewhat cruder version (cursing was forbidden in the Good Life, a rule left out in the formation of the Project’s night, possibly to attract more prominent rappers). Aceyalone also rapped with Abstract Rude in The A-Team.

Style

Aceyalone (Acey) often merges odd beats from many different genres with a healthy mix of very “underground” lyrics and mainstream ideals (see Cater to the DJ for distinctions). Heavily influenced by his time in Freestyle Fellowship and Haiku, many Acey songs contain jazz beats and poetic rhymes, as well as continuous to Project Blowed (sometimes talking up the Project, sometimes bragging about his involvement, and often seemingly as advertisement, a rather mainstream tactic). He’s not afraid to branch out – his album Lightning Strikes merged (not totally successfully) his underground rap-battle style of rhyming with pop-reggae beats and timing and some dancehall tunes. The results are not always smooth, but his inclusion of styles like country, blues, religious, pop, and some mainstream rap music makes him a well-rounded artist with years of true rap battles beneath his belt buoying his style. In particular, his song “To The Top” is a very bizarre fusion of country timing, military marching tunes, gospel ideology, electric guitar back beats, and an odd collusion of city wisdom with down-home phrases.

Video

This is a clip from the movie “You Got Served”, a breakdancing film with a battle set to Aceyalone’s “Find Out” (a song very much dedicated to the Underground image – here are the lyrics).