Golden State Hip-Hop

Before he became a gangsta rap icon, 2Pac was dancing in Digital Underground — Oakland's P-Funk-fixated hip-hop troupe. That bizarre dichotomy illustrates the Bay Area's borderless stream of rap both above- and underground. DJ Shadow crafts moonlit beat compositions, Too $hort is the original gangsta, and E-40 keeps it poppin' for the street.

As a counterpoint to the underground posse-cut classic "93' Till Infinity," the Bay Area also gave birth to its very own Dr. Dre in the early '90s — the gangsta rap/G-funk trailblazer Celly Cell. On a whole other plane entirely is the prolific producer of many guises, Madlib, and the abstract, always changing Anticon collective.

You may not recognize the names stamped across our Deep Cuts (except for that Tupac guy), but rappers raised in the Bay Area will swear by these local standbys: Living Legends co-founder/knowledge-spitting MC The Grouch, the woefully underheard duo Latyrx, and the Quannum Spectrum platter that introduced such West Coast slam poets as Jurassic 5.

The Golden State hip-hop scene has always embraced the mainstream and underground, allowing the two to coexist back to back and, occasionally, to cross-pollinate. Consequently, it's provided a fertile breaking ground for coffee-shop MCs, green-paper-stack playas, bedroom producers blessed with truly original ears, complete oddballs like Digital Underground and Del tha Funkee Homosapien, and a couple risk-taking crews, including Hieroglypics (Souls of Mischief, Del) and Quannum Projects (DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, Latyrx).