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Paris

Oscar Jackson Jr. makes the most explicitly political rap in America and has been getting records pulled, shelved and dropped by distributors for thirty-five years as a result. He has never adjusted.

Early life and origins in the Bay Area

He grew up in the East Bay and studied managerial economics at the University of California, Davis. The Nation of Islam and Black Panther Party politics that run through his catalogue are positions he holds rather than a persona he adopted.

Album discography

The Devil Made Me Do It (1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (1992), Guerrilla Funk (1994), Unleashed (1998), Sonic Jihad (2003) and Acid Reflex (2008).

Sleeping with the Enemy

Tommy Boy and then Time Warner refused to release the 1992 album over "Bush Killa", a first-person assassination fantasy about the sitting president, released during an election year and shortly after the Los Angeles uprising. He bought himself out of the deal and released it on his own label, where it sold well over a hundred thousand copies.

Guerrilla Funk Recordings

He founded the label to release his own work and later put out records by Public Enemy, Kam, T-K.A.S.H. and others. It functions as a home for political rap that no major would touch, which is a small market he has kept alive single-handedly.

What he is known for musically

Dense, hard-edged funk production — he produces his own work — under writing that is closer to political pamphleteering than to rap convention. He does not do metaphor or deniability. The records state positions.

Working outside music

He worked as a stockbroker for a period, which he has discussed as a deliberate study of the system he criticises. He has continued producing, writing and commentating, and remains one of the very few rappers whose politics have never softened with age or income.

The Devil Made Me Do It

The 1990 debut arrived alongside Public Enemy's peak and was, if anything, more direct. It established the template he has kept: hard funk production, Nation of Islam and Panther politics, no metaphorical cover.

Bush Killa and the Tommy Boy split

Tommy Boy declined to release Sleeping with the Enemy and Warner declined to distribute it. He negotiated his own release from the contract, kept the masters, and put it out himself — an outcome that at the time was almost unheard of and which gave him the independence he has operated in since.

Producing for others

He produced Public Enemy's Rebirth of a Nation in 2006 in its entirety, writing much of it as well. Chuck D handing an album over to another producer-writer is a significant endorsement, and the record is more coherent than most late Public Enemy.

Consistency of position

Thirty-five years in, the politics have not moderated and the commercial position has not improved, which are related facts. He is one of the few American rappers whose work would be genuinely difficult to release on a major label today for the same reasons it was in 1992.