Article (Gowhere Hip Hop): Twinkie Jiggles (Of Heiruspecs)

Twinkie Jiggles (Of Heiruspecs)
This is a hella dope article written by Twinkie Jiggles, who holistically analyzes the Chicago hip hop scene. Especially since he's not originally from Chicago, he provides a fresh new perspective on the state of hip hop in Chi-Town. Entitled "Top 5 Chicago Hip Hop Songs of All Time from a Minnesota State of Mind", the articles raises a variety of valid points and gives individuals such as the iLLVibes bloggers an interesting look into the Windy City.

Here's an excerpt of the article. To see the full article in its entirety, go here.

All right, Chicago got the longest hip hop history of any city in the Midwest. They’ve been putting out quality artists for decades that have made it on the national scene. That makes it feel different than the Twin Cities where we’re enjoying our first decade of putting out some artists hitting on a national level. So I want to give the nod in this article to those artists that I heard about from being an underground Midwest head. If my dad had never moved me to Minnesota in 10th grade I would’ve known about Kanye, Da Brat, Common, Lupe, Twista. So, respect is due to all these great artists, but you aren’t going to hear about them in this article. Trying to define underground is a hopeless pursuit but I’m guessing that most of the folks on this list have sold under 80,000 records in their whole career. Let’s look at it a different way; it’s 1998 and my dad has some business down in Chicago so Felix and I rode down to Chicago and tried to learn about Chicago hip hop. We were too young to get into clubs and this was before all that internet marketing so we grabbed every flyer we could and bought a couple CDs and records from Gramophone. So we went to Gramaphone, Time to Pound, Tower Records on Clark and anywhere else we could find. I bought a magazine that had E.C. Illa on it. I saw a flyer with Aceyalone and Atmosphere on it. We sold Gramophone a couple Heiruspecs tapes. This is the list from the journey that that trip continued me on. It brought me to playing shows with Contriband, Abstract Giants, Molemen and many others. And this is largely the trip I’m still on, loving when I find new hip hop that I connect with.

For more information on the Heiruspecs, check out their myspace page. From the Gowhere page, you can also download all 5 tracks that Twinkie mentions!