Rhymesayers Entertainment Is Never Going Out of Style

Photos by Zoe Prinds-Flash

Twenty years is not just a lifetime in hip-hop, it is several lifetimes—an epoch, maybe even an eon. When Minneapolis’s Rhymesayers Entertainment was formed in 1995, Jay Z had not yet released Reasonable Doubt. Rawkus Records was still two years from releasing Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus. Kanye West was seven years from having his jaw wired shut. The Roots were touring college dining halls on the back of Do You Want More?!!!??! Now they’re the house band on The Tonight Show. And Rhymesayers is still here, right here, in Minneapolis.

It’s not that Rhymesayers hasn’t changed, but there’s also a stubborn constancy here that endures from the label’s very early days. Part of it is the vaunted work ethic and example of their flagship group Atmosphere, but part of it is also a cautious, conservative approach to a business that traffics by and large in flash and spectacle. “We don’t take huge leaps,” CEO Brent “Siddiq” Sayers told me once in an interview around the label’s tenth anniversary (for an alternative weekly that’s since folded). “We do that on purpose. Trying to jump up further than you really should at any given time just works against you.”

As the music industry has gone through sea changes brought on first by illegal digital downloading, then legal digital downloading and now streaming, Rhymesayers has kept its head down and moved the ball forward by inches, largely on the strength of relentless touring. It is—in fact—almost as if 15 years ago the label invented the new paradigm the industry itself is only now discovering: tour the shit out of the country constantly, and make converts one by one and control the sale of your music as directly as possible.

While other labels and artists have come and gone through higher highs and lower lows in the last 20 years, Rhymesayers remains, and that was what Friday night’s celebration at Minneapolis’s Target Center was intended to honor.

First of all, seven hours of rap is a lot of rap, and through the speakers in a giant arena is not the best way to hear hip-hop you’ve never heard. The latter was almost inevitable given the spread of 18 or so acts that performed between 5 PM and the show’s close just short of midnight. MCed with expertise by Brother Ali, the night’s early start brought hyper-abbreviated sets that gradually stretched out, including highlights from Dem Atlas, I Self Devine, and Grieves.

Dem Atlas

Dem Atlas is the label’s youngest artist at 25, and with an asymmetrical pile of dreads and skinny jeans, he’s looks like the closest thing the staunchly old school label has to a more modern kind of polyglot music like Kendrick Lamar or The Weeknd. With cuts like “Watabout” exhibiting less boom-bap than an acute bittersweet tilt, his music falls in the lineage of wryly observed, first-person narrative that Atmosphere established while managing to nudge it forward.

I Self Divine

I Self Devine’s set of direct and chiseled hip-hop hit hard, including a shout out for Black Lives Matter. “Taking over a police station,” he said. “That’s some groundbreaking shit.” Grieves’ set included live guitar and keyboards, which in the boomy Target Center brought a welcome diversity of sound to the often bass-heavy mix of pre-recorded cuts and DJ work. A lithe, whipsmart presence on the stage, Grieves’ stuff hewed to the personal and away from the political; he introduced one song by telling the sad story of coming home to find your woman “sitting on your bed with another man listening to your D’Angelo records.” The contrast between I Self Devine and Grieves worked well, and showed off two of the poles that Rhymesayers has often orbited between: the confessional and the socially conscious.

Grieves

When fan favorite Prof bounded onto the stage with inflated animals to throw into the crowd and flanked on either side by the kind of wiggly fan-powered men that adorn used car lots, we got a dose of another component of Rhymesayers’ identity: the gleefully absurdist. Wearing a Minneapolis Lakers George Mikan jersey, Prof was pure id, throwing water at the crowd and shouting or machine-gunning his way through songs while mean-mugging and making dirty jokes. The crowd ate it up completely, but I have to confess the lightning fast crosscutting between tracks left me feeling like I’d just eaten several tubs of Cool Whip rather than a meal. I just don’t know if there’s any there there when it comes to Prof.

Prof

If you want substance, though, just go straight to Brother Ali, who gracefully moved from MC to emcee as he brought on a coterie of female breakdancers called S.H.E. (She who Holds Everything). There are some performers who just know how to command a stage, and nothing puts this into stark relief like a venue the size of the Target Center. Ali knows how to hold the stage. He introduced his song “Uncle Sam Goddamn” by saying it got him in some hot water, then went directly at the issue of police violence and Jamar Clark’s death—an undercurrent that had been running through the night. “This is terrorism,” he said. “And we are in this building because of hip-hop, which is the genius of black and brown people.”

Brother Ali

The overall positivity he had stoked by asking the crowd to shout “Love” had to take a back seat for a moment when he began a poem called “Dear Black Son” that was captured on video at one of the recent protests in Minneapolis. In the Target Center, when he landed on, “How could anyone not love you?,” nearly shouting it, it was chilling. In short, there was no other performer on the night who intertwined the duties of entertaining and elevating awareness better than Brother Ali, and it’s clear why he’s become the label’s second most important artist behind Atmosphere.

Atmosphere

And finally, Atmosphere. Proceeding through highlights from their discography stretching all the way back to “Scapegoat” from 1996’s Overcast!, Ant worked the beats from behind the elevated DJ riser while Slug enjoyed himself. “I’m here today to have the best fucking day of my life,” he said with a broad grin. Old friends came out: Spawn joined Slug for two tracks from Overcast! as well, and Murs helped bring the house down (and at least one bra out) on “Dirty Girl” from 2005’s Felt 2. It was a victory lap of a set in a lot of ways, and Slug treated it as such, not letting it get too long but also taking time to let the silence hang between songs as he looked out over a seas of faces that must have been all but unimaginable when Rhymesayers began as a way to sell Headshots mixtapes at basement parties in the 90s.

Slug and Spawn

The journey, though, hasn’t been without its casualties. Five years ago this past October 16, Mikey “Eyedea” Larsen passed away, and the night was filled with tributes both big and small to his memory. An earlier set by DJ Abilities ended with a sweet photo of him and his late partner wearing Rhymesayers shirts and looking like they were in junior high, projected onto the venue’s big screens. When Atmosphere performed “Flicker” from Southsiders—written about Eyedea—Slug had the stage lights shut off and asked everyone to pull out their phones. Maybe I haven’t been to enough arena shows recently, but the effect was genuinely moving, the bowl of the arena lit up by thousands of little fireflies that created a soft, glowing ambience. It showed that what the night had been building toward slowly was nothing so simple as a party, but a collective affirmation of the struggle, in both its sadness and joy.

When nearly every one of the night’s performers joined Atmosphere onstage for the finale of “Trying to Find A Balance” from 2003’s Seven’s Travels, it hit home just what Rhymesayers has built by moving so meticulously but inexorably. As Siddiq himself admitted in an open letter about the controversy surrounding female rapper Psalm One’s non-appearance at the show, there are areas where Rhymesayers has not done enough. Their desire to always be able to move back to safety from any step forward has meant they haven’t always been adventurous in bucking industry trends, but it also means they’ve slowly built something that isn’t exactly an empire, but more like a family-run trading post at the edge of the wilderness.

There might have been a moment somewhere in the early 2000s when Atmosphere and Rhymesayers were the sexy hot thing, when they could have made some leap into a much greater popularity, but that’s never what they’ve been about. It’s always been about the work, and how the work of hitting the road time and time again is its own reward, how it builds a family. That might never really be in style, but it’s also never going out of style.

View more photos of the performers below:

Los Nativos

Grayskul

P.O.S.

Boom Bap Project

Toki Wright

Blueprint

Mr. Dibbs

Musab

Aesop Rock

The Uncluded (Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson)

Dilated Peoples

Steve McPherson is a writer living in Minneapolis. Follow him on Twitter.

Zoe Prinds-Flash is a photographer living in Minneapolis. Follow her on Twitter.