Sole

"It's just another brick in the white man's mansion," says Sole with a shrug of his shoulders as he talks about music. Such scathing honesty is typical of the rapper who became so disillusioned with the mainstream hip hop scene that he co-founded the Anticon label. "I think music can and should redefine society - all the information's there for everyone but nobody's paying attention. It's just another commodity, you know?"

Not even his own music escapes his withering censure and in the opening track of his new album 'Live From Rome' he is found to be rapping: "My music, my music, is cheap entertainment". His cynicism about the industry and the world around him bleeds through his songs in raw, expressive rants, in that unmistakable hoarse voice of his, that touch on anything from Michael Moore and jihad to Debbie Gibson. His world view is decidedly pessimistic. "I see it as being dominated by many forces, human interests all over the place, sociologies thrashing against each other," he explains. "People are just set in their ways and it's a pattern that reoccurs every 10,000 years. That's why I say my music is just cheap entertainment, it's like this is what I do but it's not going to undo the way humanity has always been. Every revolution ends up the same way you know what I mean?"

Filled with his trademark brand of skewered, black humour, the album is he reveals rather surprisingly "supposed to be my happiest". Certainly during the making of the album he was adjusting to a few dramatic life changes having upped sticks and moved to Barcelona as well as getting married. Of his decision to relocate he says: "I was bored and I wanted a new experience, something authentic and real. Life is to be lived - I don't want to sit in my house for seven years and then sit there for another seven years and wonder what it would be like to live in Barcelona or what it would be like to climb the Alps." But the lure of life in America is never far away, he adds. "I'll be back in America in a year - it's calling me or maybe I'm calling it."

Anticon's core members also include Alias, Doseone, Jel, Odd Nosdam, Passage, Pedestrian, and Why? The collective's style of experimental hip hop, dominated by free verse style poetics rapped over chaotic beats, has earned them a cult following even though they have not yet become the global success story Sole originally hoped for. "I expected Anticon to be much bigger, much earlier. I'm psyched that we still exist and it's great that we get to do this at all but when we first started we thought we were going to conquer the world in two months. It doesn't work that way - it's hard starting a label. Being an artist is gut-wrenching."

The hip hop industry in America has not always been so kind to Sole though. When Anticon first came onto the scene many people questioned whether it was hip hop at all and saw it as a threat to the very foundation of the genre by a bunch of nerdy white guys. Then there was the time when Sole very publicly fell out with fellow MC El-P from Company Flow. "I don't know who gets to say hip hop has to be this small. It's been around for 20 years and it's still the newest form of music. I make hip hop and if hip hop people don't think its hip hop I don't care," he says emphatically.

Even so Anticon has been widely credited with carving their own niche in rap which challenges all clichés about hip hop. The foundation for Anticon came in a collective called Live Poets that Sole set up with Moodswing 9, Alias and Mayonnaise. The name is apt given the lyrical nature of Sole's rapping style. "My rap is my teenage melodramatic angst-ridden poetry," he jokes. "I never considered it poetry, I just write songs."

He says he finds it difficult to describe his music: "I talk about the world and try to make it interesting." Others before him have labelled it anything from avant-garde to progressive. "We've thrown out all these stupid words and people use them and throw in their own little phrases. It's hip hop music. It's the same as folk music, the same as electronic, the same as rock. There comes a point where people just make music and they're not thinking about what it is."

Social issues rank high in the list of topics that Anticon rap about and Sole is blunt about all the things he dislikes about mainstream hip hop artists although he does admit to a slight fondness for Jay-Z. "It's misogynistic, it's about drug dealing, it's about punching people in the face. I don't think those ideas are really healthy ideas to put into the minds of little kids." While he concedes that critics have also accused his raps of being negative Sole insists that music should be socially responsible in some way. "I think as an artist it's your role and duty to not waste your time, to not misuse your five minutes of fame."