Free Close to the Edge by Sujatha Fernandes Page B

back to my hotel, I pulled out my Walkman and began listening to Obsesión's new album, La Fabri-K , a collaboration with the group Doble Filo. “Why should we wait? For who? Who's gonna do it, EGREM?” Alexey rhymed over a syncopated drum kit and deep bass, on the introduction to the album. “Independent production, listen to me / Yo, good or bad, it's ours, made with love and a few extra provisions / We're ready, the disposition of all my people / There's no manager, we ourselves are sufficient.”
    There was no way of operating as a rapper in Cuban society without depending to some degree on the state. Rappers had picked this up very early on. For some, like Randy, it made their lives much more difficult, while others had greater success at navigating the cultural bureaucracy. But as the government began to usurp the space that rappers had created, rappers responded with independent production. Maybe the DIY model was the key to a truly dynamic hip hop planet. This was a model that had already found a home in several American cities, including Chicago, a hub for independent and underground hip hop.

CHAPTER 2
    Down and Underground
in Chi-Town
    T he entrance to the Red Dog Club in Chicago's Wicker Park was through a set of staircases at the back of the club. Like much else hip hop in Chicago, you had to be with insiders to navigate the hidden labyrinths and tunnels to this world. It was September 1998. I had arrived just days earlier in Chi-town to start graduate school, and I was staying with my childhood friend Gautam Ramnath. I hadn't seen Gautam since we were awkward teens forced together at our parents' social gatherings, and I half-expected him to be a computer geek or an investment banker. To my happy surprise, he and his roommate, Mike Walsh, were neither geeks nor bankers; they were b-boys at heart and eager to introduce me to Chicago's hip hop scene.
    The Red Dog was a mecca for House music—a bass-heavy, electronic style of dance music pioneered in Chicago that was highly popular among African American youth. But this Saturday night the club was host to the backpack rap set wearing Baby Phat, Ecko, and Adidas originals. We paid our ten-dollar cover charge and were shunted out onto an open dance floor where b-boys genuflected midpose before the religious icons and stained-glass windows that adorned the space.
    I was immediately struck by the diversity of the faces. In one cypher a slim Asian woman came out of a freeze and conceded the floor to a black guy in dreads, who rocked upright for a few moments and then dropped to the floor in a characteristic six-step routine. Beyond my friend Gautam, who is Indian, and Mike, an Irish American from Chicago's South Side, I saw other Asian Americans, African Americans, whites, and Latinos. I had been strongly drawn to the multiracial nature of Chicago as a city, and this dance club seemed to be an expression of that.
    Taking in the scene, I wondered if these multiracial b-boys and b-girls were a product of Chicago's underground hip hop resurgence. I had followed the rise of underground independent rap in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, where the rap artist Too Short's albums went gold and platinum without major label support. The Chicago artists Common, Twista, and Kanye West followed suit soon after. In contrast to the stereotypical and violent representations of blackness in corporate rap— consumed by mostly white suburban audiences—underground rap made room for different ethnicities, different ways of being black, and other alternatives to the standard music industry formulas. 1 Maybe underground rap could be the vehicle for uniting the hip hop generation, bringing it together across racial and ethnic lines.
    Yet how, I thought as I crossed the dance floor to the bar, could these brown and white faces find a place within the imagined black planet? In Cuba rappers were Afro-descendant; their claims to blackness were undisputed, at