Mr. Lif's 2002 Emergency Rations EP, released on Definitive Jux, arrived months before his debut full-length I Phantom and established him as the sharpest political voice on a label already built around confrontation.
The EP opens with a skit about Lif going missing, and the cover art shows planes bombing civilians then dropping aid on those same civilians. That is not a coincidence. This is post-9/11 hip-hop that does not flinch, made at the exact moment when flinching was the norm.
The full review traces how Def Jux founder El-P shaped the label's identity around this kind of work, starting with Lif's 2000 debut Enter the Colossus. Read it to understand why Emergency Rations still sounds like a warning and not a relic.
[READ ORIGINAL →]