MoonShyne

Moonshyne is an up-and-coming Bay Area hip hop artist, who, while possessing a wide range of talents, is driven solely by his music. Having released two albums and performed with legends like Hieroglyphics and KRS-One, he’s just now reaching his peak. On his new set of mixtapes, The Beat Arkitexts – featuring original, genre-catapulting songs – he combines his Boot Camp Clik-influenced rhymes with production that runs the gamut from backpacker to trip-hop to Afro-Caribbean.

His full name is Moon Ameen, and his hip hop moniker Moonshyne comes from his childhood interest in Depression-era gangsters, whose bathtub gin and homemade moonshine helped people forget their miserable lives. “You never quite knew what was in it, but it brought people together,” he says. Similarly, with his music, you never know what you’re going to get. “I do a bunch of different styles, but it’s all to make people dance and think.” When he was a child his mother didn’t allow him to listen to hip hop, but he began bringing DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince and A Tribe Called Quest tapes home and hiding them from her. Eventually, he fell in with a crew of rap mentors who came from the east coast. Their teachings can still be heard in his music today, which is as dexterous and fast as it is thought-provoking. “The people who taught me how to spit and how to structure my words, they were all from Jersey and Queens and Brooklyn,” he says. “I was just trying to pattern my stuff after people like Black Thought and Slick Rick.”

At San Jose State he graduated with an engineering degree and, at the height of the millennium tech boom, landed a plum job in Silicon Valley. He was earning a good salary, but didn’t have any time to spend it because he was always working. “I saw the sun rise and the sun set from my cube,” he remembers. Getting laid off was a blessing in disguise; as he explains on the title track of his 2007 Sense of Direction album, he realized that nothing should stand in the way of his pursuit of his true calling, music. “Basically, it was my declaration to my family, to my management, to the world, and to myself that this is what I wanted to do,” he says. “If you really listen to the song, it says, ‘I’m going to do music, and I’m going to be successful at this.’”

His passion hasn’t slowed his side hustles, however. A 6’4” former high school athletic star, he was asked for years why he didn’t model, until he earned a contract with a San Francisco modeling agency. But music has remained Moon’s focus, starting with his 2005 debut album, The EP, which was actually a full-length album designed to give listeners an introduction to his sound. With Sense of Direction he expanded his sonic range, and the album won praise both for its neo-soul overtones and its gritty verses, which were compared to Talib Kweli and Mos Def. In the meantime he toured with seminal Oakland act Hieroglyphics and opened for Bronx titan KRS-One.

The Beat Arkitexts series will be released in installments over the coming year, and promises to be his most ambitious project yet. Volume One features production from San Jose’s DJ Beneficial and Mickey Munday, and has a traditional hip hop feel. Future volumes will incorporate salsa, an Afro-Caribbean sound, trip-hop, and beats from a U.K.-based company. “Whether it’s Latin-influenced, urban-backpack stuff, or the U.K. sound, I specifically picked the producers because they’re dope DJs, and their job is to make people move,” he says.

The Single “I’ll Be” speaks on what music means to him. “I’ve really put a lot of time and effort into song structure, wordplay, studying the history...” he says. “I’m trying to push the movement, to make it an elite art form.” Another verse on the track is about the day he signed his modeling contract; that same day his good friend’s dad died, a man who served as Moon’s father figure when his own dad was out of the picture.

"Though he doesn’t have any kids of his own, the subject of fatherhood is close to Moon’s heart. When asked which lyrics he’s most proud of, he cites his song, “Man Up,” which will be on sale on iTunes and may appear on his upcoming mixtape series. “My dreams n drive/ My pen n pad,” he raps. “Both of em scorchin/ This important like bein a dad.”“A lot of my upbringing has been shaped by the fact that I didn’t really have a pops or male mentors more then a few years older then me,” he notes.

It’s clear that sincerity and being true to himself are Moon’s sacred ideals. It’s rare to find an emcee possessing genuine skills and honesty, but it’s this combination that will make Moonshyne a hip hop force to be reckoned with for years to come.