Paris

One of hip-hop's most militantly Afrocentric radicals, Paris struggled for most of his career to find acceptance for his fiercely political music, which drew from the provocative intelligence of Public Enemy and the gut-level rage of early Ice Cube. Born Oscar Jackson, Jr. in California, Paris earned a degree in economics from the University of California-Davis (near the San Francisco Bay Area); but hip-hop appealed to him more, and he founded his own record label, Scarface. He recorded a single, but found he lacked the resources to promote it properly, and wound up landing a ...