Ishues

By Charley Lee
Photo by Justin Evans

He was named Creative Loafing‘s Underground Artist of the Year. He won Flagpole Magazine’s Music Album of the Year. He has toured with KRS-One and opened for rappers like Ludacris and Kanye West. He holds at least 10 freestyle champion titles and his first CD broke local sales figures. He is Athens/Atlanta artist and lyrical phenomenon Ishues and he’s on a musical mission to reclaim hip-hop.
“The music today is like ordering take out, putting it on a plate, serving it to somebody and then asking them what they think of it,” says Ishues. “That’s the music business today, totally taking somebody else’s work, putting it in front of people to eat, and then claiming credit for the work that you didn’t even do. People are just recycling sounds, recycling words, recycling hooks.”

The underground free-style battling scene is where Ishues got his start, breaking records and claiming titles with his razor-sharp lyricism. Having always been an artist at heart, Ishues was determined to take his game to the next level. He recorded and dropped Reality Flows, a local release that gained him attention on a national level. After releasing Reality Flows, major labels began knocking on the door. Never one to sell himself out, Ishues turned down a contract with Interscope in favor of ensuring that his message stays with his music. With the release of his second CD Civil Unrest, Ishues hopes to annihilate the “corporate hip-hop” on the airwaves today.

“The whole spirit of hip-hop has been lost,” he says. “It’s become just a tool to make money, to advertise, to become more corporate. It’s about what sounds like money, not necessarily what speaks from the soul, what speaks from the spirit, which is what the essence of what hip-hop was, and what brought it to this point. You know, the music was raw, the music didn’t have any structure, and it spoke about things that people don’t speak about on the main stream. Like Chuck D said a long time ago, ‘Hip-hop is the CNN of the ghetto.’ And now it’s gone from the CNN of the ghetto to the sitcom of the ghetto. It’s strayed so far from reality. It’s just a caricature or facsimile of what reality is, duplicated over and over and over, just to sell records, and pump a specific agenda.” The aptly named Civil Unrest is a hard-hitting commentary focusing on the problems in the community on a local, national and worldwide level. Civil Unrest also takes things a step further as it is a national release that has started to receive international attention.

When he’s not out challenging the world, Ishues teaches a hip-hop class at the Haven Community Center in Athens. He teaches the fundamentals of MCing, lyricism and content, using the music to get people to read and observe the world around them.

“It’s that time now to stop looking for leadership and step up and be those leaders,” he says. “I can’t just put that in my music, I gotta step up too.”

Currently Ishues is working on his third album and plans on traveling abroad to spread his message.

www.myspace.com/ishues