DILATED PEOPLES - HARD HITTERS: This piece spent a long time in the works and is the only one I tended to work on for a few days, put aside for a month or so, and then come back to for another few days. The cycle continued like that for more than a year

In a way it’s somewhat symbolic, considering I get inspired to work on various pieces while listening to the artists’ music. I always find myself coming back to Dilated Peoples’ albums when I’ve gotten tired of dispassionate emcees and beats that are too complicated for their own good. Throwing on some Dilated is like hitting a HipHop reset button and taking things back to their roots – aggressive battle rhymes courtesy of Evidence and Iriscience and hard beats manipulated by one of HipHop’s illest DJs, Beat Junkie veteran Babu.

The featured lyrics are taken from “Gauranteed” from Dilated’s debut album The Platform, a West Coast underground classic.