Del Tha Funky Homosapien
Saturday :: New Belgium :: 8 p.m.
— Neil McIntyre
Long before he appeared on The Gorillaz breakout hit “Clint Eastwood,” Del Tha Funky Homosapien led a renaissance of conscious hip-hop out of the Bay Area in California. As the founder of the much respected Hieroglyphics crew from Oakland, Del forever changed the way heads looked at the genre. Unafraid to address topics others viewed as corny or decidedly not hard enough, Del started a trend in hip-hop away from gangsta and toward lyrical content and forward thinking. Widening the pallet of what people considered “real,” Del opened the door for a windfall of non-traditional emcees and backpack rappers. The irony is that Del got his start ghost-writing for his cousin Ice Cube’s group Da Lench Mob, a band that represented everything he later set out to destroy.
