Six years ago, one local producer fed up with Milwaukee's segregated rap scene decided to try to unify the community through a beat-battle competition. And the Miltown Beat Down has done just that. Founder and emcee Jordan Lee, aka DJ Madhatter...

As a kid, Milwaukee rapper SPEAK Easy inherited a love of hip-hop from his older brother, listening to any rap album that his brother brought home. It wasn't until he discovered Eazy-E, though, that he considered rapping himself...

Milwaukee is filled with rappers who brag about lavish lifestyles, exotic vacations and expensive rides. Raze isn’t one of them. On the local rapper-producer’s second album, Living in Technocolor, Raze wears his empty pockets as a badge of honor, making a stand for the average rappers who live paycheck to paycheck, taking the...

D. Ellzey knows he isn’t the only 30-something rapper, but sometimes it can feel that way. “A lot of rappers my age may have a family, business interests, a whole life outside of rap, but for some reason when they enter the rap realm, they don’t express those sides of themselves,” the Milwaukee rapper says. “They dumb it down, taking one part of themselves and exaggerating it. We all have a child inside of us...

Ramble John “RJ” Krohn, better known by his stage name RJD2, still remembers the moment that inspired him to begin creating the instrumental hip-hop compositions that would become his signature. “The big light bulb went off in my head the first time I bought a sampler,” says the producer. “I vividly remember the first time I made a beat and having this rude...

Aspiring rappers could learn a few things from Dessa, and not just in the abstract sense. The Twin Cities emcee teaches hip-hop studies for a diploma program at a St. Paul school called the McNally Smith College of Music. “I teach a course on music composition that focuses on lyrics,” says the 28-year-old rapper, born Maggie Wander. “It focuses on a lot of the same principles you might find in...

Though artists like Royal Fam and venues like the Stonefly Brewery and the Miramar Theatre have gone some way toward uniting the two scenes, the divide between Milwaukee’s East Side and North Side rap scenes remains unmistakable. There are geographic and of course practical reasons for the split—much as I may love me some club rap, I’m not going to spend my Friday nights on Teutonia Avenue�...

There's a great moment on Joe Budden's new album�actually, there are a lot of great moments on Joe Budden's new album, this one just struck me as particularly novel�where on the penultimate track Budden prays for understanding. You don't need to be a Ja Rule completist to know how these songs usually play out: The troubled rapper confesses and is granted implicit salvation, playing out the classic...

The sad truth is that most cities have trouble with hip-hop shows. Fairly or not, the genre is seen as a liability for venue owners, and with the nasty press that follows any skirmish that takes place at a hip-hop event, it's hard to blame promoters for wanting to avoid the headache. While Milwaukee has had its own issues keeping hip-hop nights downtown, they're minor compared to the o...