Project Blowed

While Freestyle Fellowship went on hiatus after the imprisonment of Self Jupiter in 1993, their legacy as Los Angeles’s most fearless catalysts for underground hip-hop innovation found an enduring next chapter. With the rap-battle epicenter Good Life Cafe providing a scene big enough for a flag-planting, cafe regular Abstract Rude and FF alumni Aceyalone established a rap open mic that spurred a compilation — which spurred a whole crew and a movement that would shape the L.A. underground for decades. Project Blowed the comp has a fascinating duality to it, both as an overview of a nascent scene and a continuation of its hosts’ creative progression. Aceyalone rounds out a stunning ’95 — All Balls Don’t Bounce dropped that year, too — with some rapport-heavy Abstract Rude collabs that make the pair out like wildly contrasting but equally free-flowing shapeshifters. (The conceptual rap-subterfuge story of “Maskaraid Parts 1 & 2” is their hilariously hyperelaborate peak here.) But the cast of characters at the margins, the ones whose more localized renown would grow into reverence off this comp, paint a broader picture. This is a space which has enough room for both Figures of Speech — a feminist rap/neo-soul hybrid featuring a young Ava Duvernay — and a playalistic, “Juicy”-jacking g-funk sex jam like Tray Loc’s “Once Upon a Freak.” And there’s like ten different rapidfire styles being innovated just in the cast-of-thousands posse cut “Heavyweights Round 2” alone.