Check out this EXCLUSIVE footage of Ill Uno Performing Live at the detroitrap.com Monthly Mixer!

Check out the 3 part series of Invincible Rocking Joints of her debut album

  You know there is one  thing I really hate about moving away from Michigan. It has been really hard for me to let go of this music stuff. More importantly not being able to see my friends do what they love to do. Like last night for instance. A friend of mine had a gig, a chance to win 100,000 . I couldn't be ther of course in physical , but I was in spirit. I wished my friend DDT good luck prior to the event via phone, and first thing this morning I asked how it went. I didn't want to hear it from a spectator I wanted it from my friend.

So DDT blessed us with his take on the night.CHECK IT OUT!!!!!!

--
D J D D T
-DJ
-Producer
-Engineer

Produced by Yung Viz, Quest M.C.O.D.Y.'s ambitious first proper studio effort, "The Light Project," is an addictively funky dose of hip-hop soul that's different from the usual suspects in the raw and grimy Detroit rap community. And that's all good. Quest is old-school in his approach and message: He's all about being true to himself.

"The message on the album is you can be a regular person; you don't have to be a super rapper or a super person or a super whatever," says the artist, whose birth name is Kimani Graham. "I wanted to show people, 'Yo, I'm just like you.' "

Although Royce Da 5'9," Guilty Simpson, D12 and Black Milk make most of the Detroit-related rap headlines now that Eminem has gone into hibernation, Quest has been grinding it out across the country for years, paying his dues while earning a reputation in label heads' ears via his no-holds-barred open mic battles. At the end of 2007, he was recognized as one of VIBE Magazine's best unsigned rappers.

Quest's résumé is nothing if not impressive: Showtime's "Interscope Presents: The Next Episode," MTV's "True Life: I Am a Battle Rapper," countless mix-tapes, DVDs and, most recently, Jump Off TV's World Rap Championships.

Loaded with dripping-sweet, '70s-flavored samples and reflective lyrics, "The Light Project" is a refreshingly introspective journey from an artist in a city that's known to be hard. But it's an emotional back story about recovering from a car accident that left him temporarily unable to move, speak or see when he was a child that may be the most important element driving Quest.

QUESTION: I'm sure you have heard many musical comparisons made to Kanye West (who was in a car accident in 2002 that inspired his first solo hit, "Through the Wire"). You were also in an accident that left you with a skull fracture and took the lives of your grandmother and two aunts.

ANSWER: I get compared to Kanye simply because I'm doing something that nobody's doing. It's not a bad comparison. My accident dates back a little, but it most definitely hits a note in my life. People die from gunshots and different things every day, and something as simple and innocent as taking a ride in the vehicle can take you away, too. I was blind for four days. So being able to see ... I appreciated being able to see a lot more that fifth day. In general, when I look at music -- like there're a lot of people out there that are blind, and if you give them music, it'll open their eyes up.

Q: Sonically speaking, this album is very different from the usual raw intensity found inside a lot of rap coming out of the city of Detroit. Yung Viz is the sole producer? What was the recording process like?

We recorded it fairly quickly. I don't even remember writing the album; that part was so organic. But this album did take about a year to make. We mixed the album longer than it actually took to write and produce 'cause I'm real hands-on when it comes to the mixing process.

With me and my music, I feel that if I put who I am and what I am on the table, then I know I'm being judged for me and not a persona I made up.

I got a record called "SOS" on the album, and it basically talks about us as people having to save ourselves. Too many times, we look for our president, preachers, pastors or our parents to save us when we gotta start policing ourselves. We gotta take responsibilities for the things that we do and the actions that we take.

Q: That sentiment isn't something rappers are usually willing to hang on when first putting out music. By no means is your album one-dimensional; there are a lot of different styles and feels to your music. But I seem to keep going back to the overall message you are sending ... like the song "Champion."

A: That record is there to show people that we can be proud of ourselves for being who we are. And you can applaud yourself, too, because in the beginning phases of anything, nobody's going to cheer for you but you.

Q: "The Light Project" is now out and the CD-release party is at the Shelter on Friday. Where do you take it from here?

A: We're gonna keep booking different dates, but I have built a pretty big name for myself as far as Michigan hip-hop goes. So what I'm doing is I'm visiting different places for extended amounts of times, like Orlando, Miami, Chicago, New York. My base goes pretty wide -- the Internet has helped me a lot. I've been on MTV. I've been on Showtime. I've been seen by millions throughout the years. At one point in my rap career, I did a lot of battle rapping. I'm regarded as one of the top 10 battle rappers in the world.

I've always been in the studio, too. However, I had to do more growing as a person; that was the main change I had to do to get me here.

I've made a name for myself as a battle rapper, but I'll always be considered a battle rapper until I make a big name for myself as something else."

By B.J. Hammerstein, Metromix

"Every A&R's worst nightmare" carves out her own path in hip-hop.

By Rachel Swan

Detroit rapper Invincible (née Ilana Weaver) had her chance to get on ten years ago, but she purposely passed it up. The Israeli-born émigrée came up right alongside a certain white rapper who subsequently attained international fame — making every other white rapper from Detroit seem like a potential cash cow. Invincible said multiple labels were on her jock by the time she turned sixteen, in 1997. "Many people were trying to sign me because they saw me as a female version of him," the emcee recalled. She said that one day she got a call from someone representing the indie label Web, which had produced Eminem's 1996 album Infinite , a few years before he signed to Aftermath. "They offered me a million dollars over the phone," she said.

Naturally, the emcee was skeptical of anyone who equated her with Eminem, since their lyrical content was so different. Moreover, she was skeptical of anyone who wouldn't allow her to control her own publishing, or own the rights to her masters. "Actually the most hilarious thing was when I moved back to Michigan, XXL had wrote a five-page article calling me 'every A&R's worst nightmare,'" the emcee said. (She disliked the article, but apparently liked the epithet enough to include it in her bio.) "So I started getting a reputation for turning down deals. More labels started trying to sign me at that point."

Invincible had always been a rabble-rouser. Born in Israel — or Palestine, as she puts it, but inside Israel's 1948 border — she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1988 and learned English by listening to hip-hop records. Besides Cat in the Hat and ESL classes, Invincible said her first interaction with the language was "writing down other people's rhymes, and looking up the words." Within two years, she'd started composing her own lyrics in English. By age ten, she'd stopped speaking Hebrew altogether. Her first album purchase, appropriately enough, was Paris' provocative 1992 joint, Sleeping with the Enemy . In fact, the title was prophetic.

The neighborhoods surrounding Detroit, where Invincible hung out as a teenager, were heavily populated by Arab Americans. As she got older and started making ties in the Arab community, the young artist began questioning — or in her words "unlearning" — the Zionist narrative she'd grown up with in Israel. Naturally, her parents were aghast. "Most of my family in Israel refuses to speak to me," the artist said, adding that she's since managed to open up dialogue with her parents, but her extended family skews more conservative. "Recently my mom took a trip back home and her sister kicked her out of the house for protesting the Wall. At least my parents will stay engaged in the conversation — the rest of the family pretty much cut me off for my views."

By age fifteen, Invincible was rocking open mics in the Detroit area, many of them hosted by the famed D12 rapper Proof (who helped jump-start Eminem's career but was shot dead in 2006, before ever getting his due). She battled other emcees occasionally but quickly got bored of it, wanting instead to write her lyrics — often laboring over them for months, even years, to get the phrasing exactly right. After deciding not to go the major label route, she hooked up with the all-female hip-hop crew the Anomalies — whose members include emcees Helixx, Big Tara, and Pri the Honeydark, along with DJ Kuttin Kandy — and resettled in New York for three years. From that point on, the emcee carved out a path that would relegate her to the indie world, but also allow her to sustain total creative control over her music. Her canniness around industry bigwigs is probably the reason she has real staying power.

Upon returning to Detroit, Invincible found an apartment in the mostly-Latino southwest section of the city. She also got back into community organizing, including with the US Palestine Youth Solidarity Network. Her political views — about gentrification in Detroit, about artistic integrity in hip-hop, and, most compellingly, about ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank — had always been the linchpin of her music, but she got better at researching and articulating them. Her language has a real writerly quality, such that the verses sound like a well-crafted poem. Her writing process usually begins with listening to a beat, scatting flow patterns, and coming up with a cadence that sometimes inspires a visual concept for the song. The idea that animates one of her most powerful tracks, "Locusts," sparked because the beat — DJ House Shoes' thinly orchestrated mix of kick, snare, and flute, with weird, apocalyptic buzz in the background — sounds, in her words, "like locusts swarming at you."

"Locusts," which inspired a music video/documentary with commentary from housing activists and teenagers about changes in the neighborhood, is an incisive critique of the current efforts to beautify downtown Detroit. In her rap, Invincible swaps metaphors for gentrification and large-scale colonization: Locusts and buzzards circle and hover above the/Abandoned houses, shattered window with the crooked shutter/Across the street constructing cookie-cutter condominiums/Sign of Woodward is the Prime Meridian . The condo development she's referencing is a dramatic redevelopment of Detroit's metro area. Woodward Street is the main artery that splits Detroit into an east and west side, running all the way from the downtown to the tony northern suburbs — hence the "Prime Meridian" analogy (its proper analogue in the East Bay would be Broadway).

Depending on your viewpoint, Invincible is either the most ethical or the most politically strident emcee to emerge in recent years. Rather than sign to a major she ultimately formed her own fair-trade hip-hop label, Emergence Music, through which she recently dropped the solo album Shapeshifters . She's allegedly turned down more million-dollar deals, snubbed the glossies, and laughed in the face of A&R scouts — but probably saved herself the anguish of being a flash in the pan. Looking back, she doesn't regret the decision. "For me it was like the more I stuck to my guns, the more doors opened up," said the emcee. "Opportunities were created by me refusing wack opportunities."