Aceyalone’s omnipresent ambition

Aceyalone wants to make hip-hop an art form, he says. So it makes sense that he’s doing a poetry book, and that he has ambitious ideas about what an album should be. 1998’s A Book of Human Language was literary to the hilt—different tracks are chapters, not songs, and he recites Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” through a pitch-shifter—and his most recent Lightning Strikes is a genre exercise based in Jamaican dancehall, touching on crime and poverty (“To The Top”, “Suicide”), Yoruba mythology (“Shango”) and party cuts (“Easy”) with the same confidence and expertise. Now he’s set to release his seventh record Aceyalone and the Lonely Ones in July, which he says is going to explore vintage soul music just as faithfully as Strikes did dancehall. “It’s impossible to express your whole career in one album,” he says. “Staying conceptual like that pleases me. Other cats aren’t doing it, so I like it.”

Aceyalone’s ambition isn’t just confined to his albums. He co-founded Project Blowed, the Leimert Park hip-hop collective/label/open mic with a reputation for introducing and fostering new acts to artistic maturity—new names to listen for, says Aceyalone, include (Sis)tem, Thirsty Fish and Jah Orah. (“It’s like a hip-hop academy!” he adds.) And while he’s not comfortable naming names, he estimates 35-45 percent of hip-hop artists working today are influenced in some way by Blowed—either by a session they went to or as an MC who got their start there. “It’s just like anything else,” he says. “We got generations of cats that follow our lead.”

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