On Wednesday, November 13, DaWreck of west-side hip-hop group Triple Darkness posted a mini documentary to YouTube about E.C. Illa’s 1994 EP, Live From the Ill. The video E.C. Illa Dissecting Live From the Ill shows E.C. sitting in front of a camera and talking for almost 28 minutes about the creation and history of his EP. When he dropped Live From the Ill, E.C. was one of Chicago hip-hop’s brightest stars, and his recollections of the music, people, and places that filtered into the EP make the video a must-watch for any hip-hop head. The release of the documentary was timed to promote a 25th-anniversary CD reissue of Live From the Ill by Big Herc Collections that came out the same day, but it stands on its own as a crash course in local rap history.
TuneIn is hardly the first outlet to parachute into town hoping to tell the world about the exciting developments in Chicago hip-hop. But while so many others indulge in an exploitive fascination with drill, Valadez barely mentions it, and then only in terms of its relationship to systemic violence. I’d thought it’d be impossible to talk about Chicago hip-hop in the 2010s and completely leave out Chief Keef, whose astronomical rise in 2012 put the national spotlight on the local scene. But unless I missed a passing reference, Keef is never named. Valadez and Consequence of Sound critic Wren Graves suggest that Chance the Rapper’s 2016 mixtape Coloring Book was “the coming-out party for the Chicago hip-hop movement,” which I suppose could be true if by “movement” you mean “people who appear on Coloring Book.” By my reckoning, they’re four years late: the floodgates really opened for a new wave of Chicago hip-hop in May 2012, when Kanye West shouted out LEP Bogus Boys, King Louie, and Chief Keef on the GOOD Music remix of Keef’s breakout hit, “I Don’t Like.”
Some of these reissues have come out in absurdly small editions, either in an attempt to create the appearance of exclusivity or in an acknowledgment that their potential audience is tiny. Big Herc pressed just 94 copies of E.C.’s Live From the Ill, and local microlabel Icy Palms made 54 cassette copies of an unreleased 1989 album called Cause 4 a Riot! by Chicagoland trio Wildstyle. The tapes sold out even before their mid-November release, but the music is streaming on Bandcamp, and Wildstyle rapper Kevin Beacham (who’s also a hip-hop historian) recently published a 30-part series about the group on Medium.
Rubberoom lost their momentum after New York indie 3-2-1 Records folded shortly after releasing the group’s 1999 debut album, Architechnology, and they broke up in 2000. In the years since, Johnson has gotten requests to reissue Rubberoom’s material—in fact, a Gothic Architecture vinyl release would’ve happened already if the person interested had been able to work with the masters Nimeh had given Johnson.
The crew peaked at around 200 members, many with overlapping affiliations—Alley Katz Crew, for instance, topped out at 50 people (one of whom was famed artist Hebru Brantley), and most of them were also in Nacrobats. Their ranks ran so deep that even today you can find former members everywhere you look. Future rap heroes Offwhyte, Psalm One, and Open Mike Eagle were all involved with the crew in their youth. Brian Nevado, part owner of crucial Loop streetwear shop Jugrnaut, rapped in a group called Lyric District that formed after a Nacrobats meeting at a Burger King near Congress and State. Andre Vasquez, sworn in as 40th Ward alderman in May, used to be a battle rapper who called himself Optimus Prime, and he joined the Nacrobats after entering one of their freestyle cyphers outside that same Burger King.
Ruby Hornet threw parties at Lava Lounge with local and touring rappers, and Closed Sessions evolved from the Ruby Hornet crew’s habit of taking visiting artists to Soundscape, a Humboldt Park recording studio owned by future Closed Sessions cofounder Michael Kolar. Fruchter and company would invite the MCs to record, and Fruchter, always given to documenting, filmed the sessions. After inviting cult rapper Curren$y to rap over a Tony Baines beat in July 2009, Fruchter and his team gathered a mess of MCs to record one-offs and collaborations with almost as many different local producers. In March 2010, Fruchter announced the resulting compilation, Closed Sessions Vol. 1, on the Ruby Hornet site and posted a link to download it for free.
