Indie Rap

Indie rap is hip hop made and released outside the major-label system: self-released or issued by small independent labels, distributed hand to hand, through mail order and later online, and defined as much by its economy as by its sound. Its artists typically write dense, personal or abstract rhymes over beats drawn from jazz, soul and left-field samples, and they keep an arm's-length relationship with radio formulas. The networks built in the late 1990s by labels such as #Rawkus#, #Definitive Jux#, #Anticon# and #Rhymesayers# turned a scattered underground into a durable parallel industry with its own touring circuit and canon.