Recently in The ATG Interview Category

Our encounter with Das Racist was one of the more noteworthy experiences of CMJ '09, so I thought I'd reach out to Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri* and try to get behind the wall of booty bass and Taco Bell that obscures two of the hardest working minds on hip-hop's fringes.

In cross-country Gmail correspondence spanning a little over a week, we covered all the bases and then some. The product is an inquisition about the utility of writing in Gmail, whether or not music fans have developed a taste for fancy degrees, Amherst's fakest music scene and, obviously, health care. They were alternately earnest and cynical, terse and expansive, but never censored. I played the probing music journalist. They were Das Racist.

What would C.L. Smooth have done without Pete Rock? Common without No I.D.? Hip-hop started with the break beats and since the very beginning, the man on the 1s and 2s has had the power to make or break whatever the emcee is doing on the mic. In 2009, if there's any producer who looks to respect and uphold that fundamental symbiosis above all else, it's a guy called Exile. And if we were to make a list of the freshest, most vital beatsmiths working today, without a doubt he'd be near the top of the pile.

Few artists in any genre have the good fortune or fortitude to keep the embers of their cultural relevance aglow two decades into their career. Fewer still, can claim to have fundamentally changed an art form, and then survived to see their innovations imitated, warped, forgotten, and payed homage to all while continuing to create, raise a family and lead a relatively normal life. With It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, one of the most celebrated hip-hop albums of all time, Chuck D and his inimitable side-kick, Flava Flav, crystallized for the masses the acute aggression and political unrest that had stirred below the surface of hip-hop since its inception, and became synonymous with a black power movement still very much alive today.

We caught up with the surprisingly congenial icon at the 2009 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival as he was preparing to perform It Takes a Nation in its entirety, and talked with him about longevity in hip-hop, the meaning of Barack Obama, and why Jay-Z's crusade against autotune is so misguided.