These Bay Area Rap Legends Are Featured in 88rising’s Latest Mega Album

For those in the know, 88rising — the Los Angeles-based, Asian American-owned music company that’s built a cult following around its quirky artistry and high-profile collaborations — has become a mainstay in American music since launching in 2015 (formerly as CXSHXNLY).

With a diversely niche and seemingly limitless sense of collective empowerment, the uncategorizable entity and record label has propelled many of the dopest music projects in recent memory. According to Time magazine, “Alongside the recent surge in popularity of K-pop, as a producer and promoter 88rising has played a pivotal role in narrowing the gap between the Asian and Western music industries. Its affiliated artists have topped charts internationally, soundtracked Marvel movies, and been embraced by massive festivals and stages around the world.”

To kick off this calendar year, 88rising delivered a certified banger with the morphing collective 1999 WRITE THE FUTURE’s album, hella (˃╭̣ ╮˂̣)✧♡‧o· ̊.

The experimental, kaleidoscopic project — which clearly borrows its namesake from the Bay Area’s infinitely-supplied laboratory of slang — features artists from around the world that span across decades, including Offset, Ghostface Killah, Rick Ross, Busta Rhymes, Smino, Westside Gunn, De La Soul, BADBADNOTGOOD and more.

Among those who contributed to the invite-only recording cypher were East Oakland’s Souls of Mischief, Del the Funky Homosapien and San Francisco’s Dan the Automator.

Appearing as the fourth and sixteenth tracks on a 24-track compilation, the Bay Area emcees and producer summon the quintessentially chill and poetically funky Northern California vibes that first put them on the map in 1993 — when Souls of Mischief released the still-anthemic title track to their magnum opus, ‘93 Til Infinity. Their success amorphously continued throughout the decades under the Hiero Imperium umbrella with a smattering of other releases, including Del’s No Need for Alarm and Deltron 3030’s (Del and Dan the Automator’s futuristically-inspired subgroup) Deltron 3030. More recently, they’ve upheld the infrastructure of the Bay Area’s rap scene with their yearly festival, Hiero Day.

And though hella (˃╭̣ ╮˂̣)✧♡‧o· ̊ places the wizardly lyricists and producer over 30 years past their debuts, they sound as fresh and explosive on the mic as ever.

In one particularly smooth transition between Phesto Dee and Tajai in “yes LOvELy,” the emcees exchange a buttery rhyme scheme between each other like a cool handshake, all while loosely alluding to Northern California’s richly independent rap history, a local Major League Soccer team, the state’s tectonic geography and Bay Area political activism:

“Grown from the state of the bass kick break [Phesto Dee]/ Home of the Quakes where we make shit shake [Tajai].”

The song is laid over a Nujabes-esque cloud and wind rhythm, highlighting a liberated spirituality that the emcees riff on throughout the track with their groovy chorus: “We’re walking on clouds, wind surfing since birth / getting what we’re owed, we know what it’s worth / Souls ’round the globe, the whole of this Earth / shows, hit the road, the dough is dispersed.”

Del and Dan appear later in the album with “a LEAp in tIME,” a Japanese video game-sounding odyssey about “a leap in time, back to simpler days / when technological advances are minimal.” And yet, even in time-traveling backwards, Del remains expansive and mind-warping (“shit so deep it’s bending fools / Mr. Cool, everything I control is mystical”).

The sounds will transport veteran heads back to the days of backpacks stuffed with spraycans, and for new listeners, might open up an infinite portal of Bay Area discography.

Beyond the Bay Area virtuosos laying down their bars like ageless wonders, the album’s free-entry inclusion of rock, R&B and neo-soul delivers an all-encompassing snapshot of what music is becoming in 2024.