Artist Spotlight - N-Pire Da Great

Welcome to another edition of Po Politickin. In this episode, we politick with N-Pire Da Great. Hailing from Sacramento, California, N-Pire Da Great was born Nashua Hamilton during the era of the growing Crypts and Bloods gang wars, but also during burgeoning new music genre called hip-hop/rap. Raised in a single-father household due to the incarceration of his mother for most of his life, N-Pire’s ears were opened to the emerging music form through the sounds of Run-DMC and LL Cool J, but the sounds of 90s hip-hop heavyweights Nas, Tupac, Mobb Deep, and Tribe Called Quest is what furthered progressed his ear.

However, it wasn’t until high school when he began to take the art form seriously as a career. Local labels were courting the teen emcee, and when N-Pire was 21, even more validation came in the form of props from rap veteran Kurupt. “I was in a studio in L.A recording a song with a producer I was working with at the time, and Kurupt walked in. I had actually stepped out of the studio to smoke and came back in and I could hear him say ‘Yo, who’s this rapping? Who’s he signed to?’ And when I actually walked in and they pointed to me, I felt like, real small standing next to him. He was just like ‘Yo, you need to keep rockin, this is ill!’ He wanted to sign me at the time, but it didn’t work out. But we still keep in contact to this day.” Nothing like a co-sign from a legend!

And from then, it was on! After college, the N-Pire was producing for the likes of fellow Sacramentan emcee Brotha Lynch Hung, Main Attrakionz, Willie the Kid, Freeway, Kurupt, and The Federation. Two mixtapes also followed, 2011’s Everybody Hates Nash and 2013’s Road 2 LND, which acts a prequel to his forthcoming LP Legends Never Die. If you think you’ll get a one-track rapper with N-Pire, think again. He calls his music “reality rap,” offering different perspectives in regards to society’s problems, even offering solutions, like on songs “The One,” “11-9,” and “Silence.” But N-Pire can party with the rest of them on records such as “G-Shit” and “Get Active.” For those who claim that hip-hop is dead, wait until July 16, 2013 to witness how N-Pire Da Great is keeping great hip-hop music alive with his debut LP Legends Never Die.