Rap music is a collage. before ‘found elements’ came into fashion amongst art school students and facile postmodern critics, there have been musicians in America and other places in the African diaspora that have been incorporating previously recorded materials into the things they play. even before that, the jazz standard set the parameters for players to interpret musical themes. they used old structures to build new ideas. rap music now owes as much to this spirit as it does to the narratives encapsulated in the blues. It is an evolving system of organization using old elements to get across current ideas. the mixtape is a higher order organization of these collages, and works like an anthology of both the rap songs it contains and the original elements the song was made of, all blended together in a seamless mix. In a sense, that’s what we’re doing here, blending these interviews into one digestible volume for you to take in and make sense of. We’ve given you not the works of these artists, but accounts of the artists lives and pastimes. Art always comes from trouble, and trouble always comes from life. maybe you do, or don’t know these things well. but in here, it ain’t hard to tell.-AHTT

Long lost Zine Jams and I put together a couple of years ago, never printed, never released, now separated into four parts ready for download.

Pt 1. Cappadonna