Since their debut album “Lets Be Free,” the radical hip hop duo Dead Prez rapidly emerged as one of the most potent political forces in music. With its militant and radical criticism of the U.S. government, racism, police brutality, and American capitalism, one music critic referred to them as "a fire bomb for the new hip hop uprising" with its straight up advocacy of black power and black nationalism.

If skills sold, Talib Kweli would have been one of the most commercially successful rappers of his time. As it was, however, the especially earnest MC became one of the most critically successful rappers of his time, which dawned in the late '90s when he rapped alongside Mos Def and DJ Hi-Tek as part of the group Black Star. This trio of up-and-comers and their widely acclaimed self-titled 1998 album debut helped make Rawkus Records one of the premier hip-hop outposts of the late '90s. In the process, they ushered in a short-lived "hip-hop" revival that took the music back to its roots, and thus away from the increasingly extreme and widespread gangsta motifs of the time.