Remembering Anticon and Hip-Hop’s Reckoning With Weirdness

Editor’s note: This story is part of That’s My Word, an ongoing KQED series about Bay Area hip-hop history.

“While hip-hop was struggling to digest us, music was accepting us,” said Adam Drucker, the rapper, producer and vocalist also known as Doseone, while telling me about the Anticon collective back in 2023. This was during the height of celebrations for hip-hop’s ostensible 50th anniversary, generating all-star concerts, award-show tributes and, in the Bay Area, That’s My Word, KQED’s ongoing initiative spotlighting the history of local hip-hop.

But it also inspired reflections about who’s traditionally considered part of that history, and who is often left out. For Doseone, a founding member of the iconoclastic Anticon collective in Oakland established by Tim “Sole” Holland and James “Pedestrian” Best in 1998, the moment generated complicated feelings.

“What you find out sometimes,” he told me, is that “if you make something exactly the way you want it because it’s never been done before, and it’s a little bit of that and a little bit of this, it’s a smaller group of people with a more refined palette [that appreciate it]. It doesn’t mean success. It doesn’t mean being included in lists. It doesn’t mean trophies. But it does exist.”

Two years later, that feeling of being underappreciated has subsided. That may be due in part to the critical acclaim Doseone, who now lives in Colorado, has received for All Portrait, No Chorus, released this year by popular New York label Backwoodz Studioz, making it Dose’s most high-profile album in years. (He’s also a video-game composer for popular games like Enter the Gungeon.) Or the fact that onetime Anticon producer Jeffrey “Jel” Logan continues to work with a wide range of artists, from M. Sayyid of Antipop Consortium to indie pioneers Latyrx, all while DJing at local spots like the Berkeley vintage store B League. And last year, producer David “Odd Nosdam” Madson remastered cLOUDDEAD, his 2001 album with Dose and Yoni “Why?” Wolf, for the San Francisco imprint Superior Viaduct. The collection of tracks, which shift between meandering singsong raps, yearning synth washes, and elliptical, poetic lyrics, have been cited as an inspiration by TV on the Radio and many others.

“Listening to [Frank Ocean’s alt-R&B masterwork] Blonde, there’s moments where I’m, like, this somehow feels like the cLOUDDEAD feeling, the way things are stretched out and collage-y with the ambient parts,” says Odd Nosdam, the Berkeley-based producer whose evocative ambient loops helped define the project.

But even if the R&B enigma didn’t mainline cLOUDDEAD excursions like “Bike” and “I Promise to Never Get Paint on My Glasses Again” before making Blonde, it’s clear that in the early aughts, Anticon helped innovate a hard-to-define sound, still prominent today, that vacillates between lo-fi electronics, shoegaze-y dynamics, winsome singsong raps, and hip-hop breaks. They anticipated much of current popular music, from the “cloud rap” trend of the early 2010s buoyed by Bay acts like Lil B and Main Attrakionz to a certain incorporation of melody that continues to define modern rap. Perhaps they don’t get as much mainstream credit as others. But their peers have begun to understand Anticon’s singular place in the underground hip-hop canon.

“You listen back to all that music, and there’s still really nothing else like it. It’s really original,” says Zack Kasten, who runs Handsmade Records in Oakland. He’s organizing an Aug. 2 memorial event for Dax Pierson, a musician and longtime friend of Anticon who passed away on Dec. 30, 2024, at the age of 54. Doseone and Jel will perform, as well as Paris-based rapper/producer Sayyid (who once lived in San Jose and worked with SF performance artists Survival Research Laboratories), rising Oakland producer Mars Kumari, and openers Golden Champagne and Flavored Sweatshirt. Proceeds go to Pierson’s life partner, Chuck Nanney.

A cross-country coalescing

Anticon began as a Bay Area phenomenon. Its core seven members relocated from other parts of the country like Maine (Sole and Brendon “Alias” Whitney), Los Angeles (The Pedestrian), Cincinnati (Odd Nosdam and Yoni Wolf as well as Doseone, via New Jersey), and Chicago (Jel).

Each had a history of being the one white guy in their neighborhood who really got into hip-hop in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They befriended one another as the underground hip-hop scene took shape in the mid- to late-’90s, with the 1997 Scribble Jam festival in Cincinnati – where Doseone competed alongside Eminem in a now-legendary freestyle battle – as a key event. Doseone, a fan of Bay underground icons like Saafir and Del the Funky Homosapien, recalls sending his material to Lyrics Born for approval; then creating the conspiracy-minded Presage project (1998’s Outer Perimeter) with Jel and Minneapolis DJ Mr. Dibbs for the San Francisco label Future Primitive Sound.

The late Stephanie “DJ Stef” Ornelas invited Sole to one of her Vinyl Exchange events in San Francisco. “She showed me an amazing time, and the reception I got through her world was, like, night and day compared to trying to break into the East Coast scene,” he remembered. “I was, like, the Bay is where it’s at. This is where I’m going.” He soon convinced the rest of the group, which had begun expanding with sundry associates like Chris “DJ Mayonnaise” Greer, David “Passage” Bryant, Tommy “Controller 7” McMahon, Rus “Rev. Destructo” Laich and Dave “Moodswing9” Cuzner, to accompany him.

The fledgling Anticon camp crammed into a two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment on Lester Avenue in Lake Merritt. “[We] were not rich, man. Everybody was lower middle class. We did not come from shit,” says Dose, remembering how they worked temp jobs while struggling to launch their careers. Later, some of them moved into a warehouse space in West Oakland. They sold CD-Rs on Telegraph Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus, continuing a tradition begun by the Mystik Journeymen, Hobo Junction, and Kemetic Suns crews earlier in the decade. And they founded their own label, Anticon, or “ant icon” — explaining that it stood for anti-conventionalism and anti-conformity.

It was during this era when Hua Hsu, then a UC Berkeley student and now a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, first met the Anticon crew. “In the late nineties or early two-thousands, there were still tons of people hawking tapes and homemade CDs around Telegraph,” Hsu wrote to me via email in 2023. “I started hanging out with Sole and visiting him and the other Anticon guys once they moved into a house together in Oakland. I liked the music, but I was drawn to them more as this collection of oddballs who had somehow found one another.”

However, the collective also generated tension for their sheer industriousness – issuing dozens of recordings a year, including Sole’s 1999 bow Bottle of Humans and Doseone and Jel’s 2000 pairing Them (a title inspired by the 1954 horror movie Them!), all at a time when putting out so much official music was still relatively unusual. Tongue-in-cheek claims by Sole, perhaps the crew’s most visible mouthpiece, that Anticon represented a kind of massive leap in hip-hop artistry rankled detractors. Their breakout national release was the 1999 compilation Music for the Advancement of Hip-Hop.

“For all their intellectualized bravado, I personally found them fundamentally really sweet, more pranksters than trolls,” Hsu observed. Nevertheless, by reacting to a “jiggy” era led by the likes of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and Jay-Z, they were typical of countless indie rappers who felt artistically superior to an ethos seemingly defined by the trappings of excessive wealth.

“There was a lot of anxiety about success and purity. The idea of DIY success was really prized, and our local heroes were people like Hiero and Living Legends, this idea of never compromising and doing everything from the ground up,” Hsu adds. “Even if you weren’t into Too Short and E-40, that idea of hustling tapes from a trunk (or on Telegraph) was part of the local DNA.”

‘Dax opened us up’

Then there was the fact that Anticon consisted of white transplants that swiftly turned into a briefly dominant local presence, successfully mounting shows at local venues like Slim’s and Bottom of the Hill that, at the time, seemed otherwise averse to booking hip-hop acts. As local weeklies like the San Francisco Bay Guardian (where I worked for a time) and SF Weekly as well as Spin and other national magazines covered their rise, the resulting backlash took on racial overtones. “It’s just ridiculous high school shit to me,” says Jel.

Less forgivably, Wolf acknowledges, Anticon was also an all-male crew whose lyrics could be carelessly demeaning of women. They weren’t alone: the underground scene was dominated by men. “It was so sausage-festy, for sure,” said Wolf. “I love each and every one of the dudes. But when you get a bunch of guys together, it’s a lot of testosterone.”

But even as Anticon grew alienated from the cloistered yet combative backpacker world, they also found plenty of supporters, and not just the white collegiates that only listened to “conscious” rap. From 1999 to 2000, they held events at Rico’s Loft, a now-shuttered nightclub in San Francisco’s SoMa district. A showcase for the rapidly expanding crew’s talents, it offered an opportunity to book and perform alongside heroes like Myka 9 and P.E.A.C.E. from pioneering Los Angeles group Freestyle Fellowship, and break bread with local acts like Kirby Dominant.

Then there was Dax Pierson, a buyer at Amoeba Records as well as a keyboardist for local bands like Winfred E. Eye. “Dax opened us up, one by one, to all of the other parallel [to Anticon] but completely different forms of music: Boards of Canada, Pinback, Merzbow, Tortoise, Robert Wyatt, This Heat,” says Doseone. “It started to change everyone’s concept of music.” Pierson helped form Subtle, a fusion of melodic rap and electronic music, with Doseone, Jel, Jordan Dalrymple, Marton Dowers and Alex Kort. Subtle eventually signed a major-label deal with Lex Records in the UK for critically acclaimed mid-aughts albums like 2004’s A New White and 2006’s For Hero : For Fool, released amid a posthumous surge back home in popularity of Bay Area icon Mac Dre.

Anticon’s burgeoning activity undoubtedly felt irrelevant to the average rap fan more interested in hyphy; Anticon’s members found more acceptance within the broader realm of indie music than American rap. The secretive yet revered Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada were noted fans of cLOUDDEAD, and remixed one of their singles, 2003’s “Dead Dogs Two.” Subtle collaborated with German indie group the Notwist on a 2005 project, 13&God. Yoni Wolf assembled twee electronic pop projects like Hymie’s Basement, a 2003 collaboration with Andrew “Fog” Broder.

Meanwhile, as a record label, Anticon proved ahead of its time, yielding an expansive catalogue that encompassed dozens of recordings while challenging and widening notions of what hip-hop can encompass. “Whether it’s Baths, Thee More Shallows, Dosh, Young Fathers, Why?, Sole, or myself, all that stuff started as these underground rap people,” says Doseone. “But it became more than that, and that’s why I think it was significant and important.”

“We just got more experimental,” says Jel. “We fit in the ‘weirdness’ section of hip-hop in the Bay.”

Dissolving and dispersing

Today, only Jel and Odd Nosdam still live in the Bay Area. Despite popular Anticon releases by Wolf’s band Why? (2005’s Elephant Eyelash and 2008’s Alopecia, in particular) as well as Chicago rapper Serengeti (2011’s Family&Friends), the record label eventually collapsed in 2018 amid internal acrimony. Sole, whose angst-ridden lyricism and heroic panache once fueled the collective, now lives happily on a farm in Maine while releasing music via Patreon. Wolf moved back to Cincinnati and released The Well I Fell Into last year. The Pedestrian, who once sparked national headlines with his 2003 East Bay Express cover story on message board-rapper-turned-jihadist John Walker Lindh, more recently worked as a lecturer at UCLA.

Sadly, Brendon “Alias” Whitney passed away in 2018 at the age of 41. Whitney was an uncommonly kind and gentle soul, and the kind of person that could innately make you reflect on the vulnerability and sensitivity of humankind. His best work, like 2002’s The Other Side of the Looking Glass and 2018’s Less Is Orchestra, the latter a posthumous collaboration with Doseone, reflected those traits.

Last February, Doseone returned to Oakland to help lead a memorial service for Pierson, who passed away in 2024 after years of life as a paraplegic. Despite being paralyzed in a 2005 car crash while touring with Subtle, he continued to perform with the band from a wheelchair. In 2021, he released the haunting yet optimistic instrumental electronic album, Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction), via San Francisco dance label Dark Entries and Ratskin Records.

With the untimely passing of Pierson as well as Whitney, Doseone – who will be arriving from a Japan tour for this weekend’s memorial concert – can’t help but reflect on how distant those years when Anticon was shaking up the music world feel now.

“You really see that the friends you make when you’re a burning ball of gas and young and passionate, if you can keep those friends, man, you just don’t make them again,” he says.

‘A Celebration of Life for Dax Pierson’ features performances by Doseone, M.Sayyid, Jel, Golden Champagne, Flavored Sweatshirt and Mars Kumari on Saturday, Aug. 2, at Gray Area Theater in San Francisco.