JAHI

Flashback to Do the Right Thing-era East Cleveland, where East Bay hip-hop MC Jahi grew up. In Jahi's hometown, rhyming was part of the daily grind: Kids would get to school at 7:30 for breakfast battles and stay on the playground ciphering for hours after class let out. At barbecues and block parties, freestyle raps were more ubiquitous than Frisbees. If you wanted to get with someone, you'd spit her a flow with your phone number in it. If you wanted to say the hotdogs were ready, you'd have to say it in rhyme. "Cats would breakdance on cardboard boxes, bump Run-DMC mix tapes, and floss hats with their names tagged on," Jahi says.

Which isn't to say Jahi grew up in environs as temperate and healthful as the settings of Car Wash or Cooley High. Even when the 31-year-old MC waxes nostalgic, he'll admit that hood life was no picnic in the age of Reaganomics. Though Jahi doesn't want to be shoehorned into the ghetto-chic thugworld of every rap-loving suburban kid's fantasy, he recalls that East Cleveland festered from poverty, overzealous law enforcement, and the crack epidemic to boot. If this were the setting of an '80s-era Dickens novel, Jahi would be a hip-hop Oliver Twist.

"At 22 I was doing grown-up stuff," he says. "I was married, raising a son, running a nonprofit daycare center, and working a part-time job. I'd already seen crack come into my neighborhood and mess up folks' lives."

It was only a matter of time before Jahi's chutzpah and political ardor would propel him to the East Bay, where hip-hop culture oscillates between the ghetto gold-earner lineage associated with E-40 and the seditious bent of KPFA's Hard Knock Radio. Bruised from the crack epidemic and recent waves of gentrification, Oakland -- like Cleveland -- is a community in constant tug-of-war, as plucky hip-hop activists vie with the decidedly unfunky mayor Jerry Brown for access to public space and control over artistic resources.

Jahi moved to Oakland last year at the behest of Tony Coleman, who founded the Mindz Eye Collective -- an organization that promotes consciousness about civil rights, resisting police brutality, and dismantling the prison industrial complex. It didn't take much behesting: Jahi was eager to infuse hip-hop into the movement, using beats and rhymes to flesh out his political lyrics.

It's a tough balance to strike, though, between preachy and catchy. Surly and groovy enough to appeal to architecture grad students and Kangol-hatted kids alike, Jahi's music has the funk-driven, piquant, moderately breezy quality of forerunners such as the Roots, and other local acts like Crown City Rockers or Felonious. His band, Jahi and the Life -- featuring bassist Kevin Lofton and drummer Maurice Miles of Kofy Brown fame, along with local stalwarts Brian Hill on guitar and Mike Myers on keyboards -- is part of a new strain of live instrumental hip-hop seeking to combine rap with the armchair styles of new-school jazz and neo-soul.

Still, E-40's much-vaunted Yay Area (his term for the burgeoning local hip-hop community) is ground zero for an underground MC whose politics align with local rapper Paris, and whose platitudes most closely resemble the upliftment rhetoric of Huey Newton. When Jahi isn't leading "Know Your Rights" workshops in Oakland schools, he's hobnobbing with Blackalicious, who he met while filming the hip-hop documentary Redefinitions in Washington, DC. He fell in with the group and expects to drop a single on their label, Quannum, next year.

The association gives Jahi plenty of cred in the indie rap sect -- surely no MC wants to come across as a capitalist hawking Tupperware raps, which is why many cats stick by their underground sensibility. While Jahi doesn't want to be pigeonholed in the underground, he views the mainstreaming of hip-hop with a healthy skepticism. He likens pop rappers to the politicians who try to curry favor in his hood with bromides about the war on poverty: "One day they're shaking hands and plastering the town with flyers, the next day they're gone."

On the other hand, taking potshots at hip-pop is part and parcel of Jahi's "conscious MC" image. And granted, he acknowledges the mercenary side of his music: the drive to make cheddar and gain a large following. This self-described "real hip-hop" MC may be ill-suited to the pimp gambit -- a boon for commercial rappers like Jay Z and Snoop Dogg -- but he definitely has crossover appeal. The cuts on Jahi's forthcoming album, Songs from the Next Level, are alternately sensitive guy-ish and hot under the collar. It's kind of a patchwork affair for an artist still trying to develop a concrete persona beyond the shopworn "conscious" image he promotes so effusively. On the smooth groove tip, love ballad "Get Away" has the soft-and-warm Quiet Storm vibe of a dude tapping into his inner Stevie Wonder. But Jahi tempers the album's slow jams with convincingly rankled numbers like "Sirius," in which he decries Clear C - east bay express

OUT OF 15,000 SUBMISSIONS AND 82 COUNTRIES BEING REPRESENTED, JAHI WINS SECOND PLACE AT THE INTERNATIONAL SONG WRITING CONTEST. GO TO WWW.SONGWRITINGCOMPETITION.COM TO SEE ALL THE WINNERS - JAHI