Blacastan: The Hip-Hop Architect

Hip-hop has always moved quickly; styles fall by the wayside almost as rapidly as they catch on. Today, Hartford, CT emcee Blacastan stands as one of the last torchbearers for the grimy boom bap approach of '90s crews like Wu-Tang Clan and D.I.T.C. It makes sense—Blac was incarcerated for the second half of the decade. He emerged with a book of rhymes to a dramatically different rap scene, but he himself remained unchanged.

Blac wears this naturalistic nostalgia well on his sprawling The Master Builder 2, blurring syllables in effortless Raekwon-esque rolls over producer ColomBeyond's diced soul samples. MB2 isn't just an aesthetic throwback, but also an ideological one. He's a classical, true school hard head, balancing focused character-driven criminal narratives like "Kingpin" with circular testaments to his own greatness. – Andrew Nosnitsky, Google Play

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