EMERGENCE

MySpace Music featured Invincible for a week and many new "friends" were made. If you haven't yet friended Invincible on MySpace, then you're in the minority. Get at her.

Vapors has nice things to say: "To call this 'conscious hip-hop' would be a grave misnomer— she’s a culturally aware, internationally minded, societal watchdog, with a library of beats so dense you almost wonder what bangers didn’t even make the cut."

...But “fucking amazing” isn’t just the result of Invincible’s politics; her social activism; her cutting dissections of racism and sexism; her self-owned fair-trade, cooperative economics-based label; her ability to contextualize gentrification and urban decline in a global context without being reductive; her ambitious and novel willingness to rap about people, rather than herself (mostly); or her endless undercutting of academic lingo that shrouds a lot of the issues she discusses with non-populist language. All of those things are awesome, and fuel the sheer immediacy of the music here, but they’re icing on the cake of just what an amazing rapper she is. Like, best period, since…I don’t even know.

Read more of Cokemachineglow's deconstruction of ShapeShifters.