In 1997, the Bay Area duo Latyrx (Lateef the Truth Speaker and Lyrics Born) released a very strange and experimental rap record, The Album. It came out on SoleSides--the label that would later become Quannum and is currently owned by DJ Shadow, Chief Excel, and Lyrics Born. The Album was not as easy a listen as DJ Shadow's seductive Endtroducing…; it was rough, unadorned, beat-heavy, and difficult. The record was to hiphop what brutalism is to architecture (brutalist structures are made from "raw concrete"). It took listeners several years to finally appreciate the release--and not for its beats, which are still harsh to the ears, but for the raps, which are baroque to the point of being indecipherable. What one gets from Lateef's and Lyric Born's wrought rhymes is not the meaning of their words but the music of their words.

In 2003, Lyrics Born released a solo album called Later That Day. Though his raps remained musical and baroque, the beats were no longer made of raw concrete. Many of the tracks on Later That Day start on a hard groove but gradually break down into soft, warm tones ("Callin' Out"), or begin to rise on a tension of strings until they are positively soaring ("The Last Trumpet"). The same is also true for his new collection of remixes, Same !@#$ Different Day, which features production work from Jumbo the Garbageman (Lifesavas), Dan the Automator (Handsome Boy Modeling School), and DJ Shadow. It also has a stunning guest appearance from KRS-One, the old school rapper whose influence on Lyrics Born is as spiritual as it is artistic. What both these records (Later That Day, Same !@#$ Different Day) make clear is Lyrics Born's total (if not fanatical) dedication to the art of hiphop. The crafting of a track is more important to him than the clear transmission of its message.

"Hiphop at its core is about taking society's leftovers and turning it into something beautiful," explains Lyrics Born over the phone. He is driving home, and the sound of San Francisco's traffic fills the background. "That is what any counterculture is about; it's crafting from the fragments, from the refuse of the mainstream. You piece all these things together, and make a musical mosaic. That's what is so unique about hiphop; it's made of many other types of music--rock samples, soul samples, reggae, new wave. Anything that has been neglected or forgotten is turned into something new. And that is the ideal that has stuck with me since I first heard 'Rapper's Delight.'"

Like so many MCs of his generation, Lyrics Born was introduced to hiphop by its first Top 10 hit, Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight." At the time the 12-inch was released in 1979, Lyrics Born, whose real name is Tom Shimura, was only 6 and had been in America for just three years. His parents left Tokyo, where he was born in 1972, and settled in Salt Lake City--only to move two years later to the Bay Area. While attending UC Davis in the early '90s, he met DJ Shadow, Chief Excel, Gift of Gab of Blackalicious, and Lateef.

Lyrics Born initially called himself Asia Born, but in the mid-'90s he changed the name because he didn't want to be identified as an Asian rapper. His main concern is not his ethnicity but his humanity, which is expressed through the medium of rap. "When I made Later That Day, it was important that the album was many things, that it had depth, was multidimensional, painted a picture that was broad. So I made songs on the album that are not really about anything, and made other songs that are about something, be it personal or social. Human beings do not have to be one certain thing; everyone is a work in progress."

The broadness of Lyrics Born's music is matched by a strict commitment to originality, to finding and doing new things. "What I do is take a look at the landscape and try to see what is missing, and it is in that gap that I insert myself," he says. "I have to make music that stands apart, that is continually going to push things forward." The hiphop ethic KRS-One established in "My Philosophy" (1988) is the ethic that Lyrics Born lives by: "You got to have style and learn to be original."

charles@thestranger.com