AT THE MIDPOINT of the Gavin Convention's main hiphop showcase this winter, the Justice League in San Francisco was packed 20 deep. The crowd had just eaten up five neophyte rap acts, and was clearly desperate for more when a hush fell. The formidable Chali 2Na and his Jurassic 5 were onstage. Cut Chemist paused and then unleashed the intro to "Concrete Schoolyard." Instantly, the Los Angeles underground, with its tag-team rhymes and feel-good beats, had 500 industry insiders and b-boys jumping up and down in unified adulation.

This, I thought, is what the underground is supposed to be like. The kind of underground that gave birth to techno, even hiphop itself. The kind of underground that is a populous movement, a groundswell, non-commercial but fiercely communal.

However, there's another, more Dostoyevskian concept of "underground": that of a place of self-imposed exile away from the inanity of the world above--a place of isolation and introspection. This is the territory that the Bay Area's Del the Funky Homosapien and his tour partners Blackalicious (rapper Gift of Gab and DJ Chief Xcel) inhabit, despite the fact that they are widely considered a part of the same underground as L.A.'s Jurassic 5, Black Eyed Peas, and Dilated Peoples. If Del and Blackalicious are underground, then they're in the basement, with Del playing Tekken 2, grooving to the soundtrack while Gift of Gab raps feverishly in the corner, trying to rhyme something with "balderdash" over Chief Xcel's art-house beats. No jumping, just lots of nodding.

To figure why there's such vast divergence within what is ostensibly the same movement, one should understand the mainstream forces the underground invariably defines itself in opposition to. In California, that mainstream has been the ruthless commercial reign of gangsta rap.

Since 1990, commercial West Coast rap has been pure pornography. That is, a white American listening to 2pac's Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. is roughly the same as a single man watching Sperms of Endearment. Both forms of entertainment make the viewer feel like they're stealing a supposedly candid glimpse into the lives of outsiders, although it's actually only a staged version of what the viewer wanted to see in the first place. With porn, male America is led into a world where all women are indiscriminately sexual, and all lesbians are beautiful and femme. In gangsta rap, white America is led on a tour through a cartoonish Compton or Oakland where--lo and behold, just as white America expected--blacks are incorrigibly violent and chauvinistic not only against women, but also fellow African Americans. You don't have to be Cornel West to see how deeply reassuring it is for white Americans to see violence and prejudice (which whites invented in this country) spilling forth from the mouths of black men.

Even though there are underlying truths behind gangsta rap, and value in bringing attention to the ghetto while simultaneously terrifying the FBI and Tipper Gore, the unyielding commercial dominance of gangsta rap has been destructive for hiphop. Only now, 10 years later, are alternative voices breaking through. In Los Angeles, those voices are dissenting by offering positive, inclusive, party-flavored hiphop: Black Eyed Peas, as they tell it, are Black, Asian, and Caucasian; Chali 2Na affably takes his crew back to a soulful, beat-filled time before rap got drenched in blood.

Blackalicious and Del, on the other hand, are not community organizers. They don't sing choruses with their crews. They prefer rapping alone. They dissent through idiosyncrasy. Del, for his part, eschews teenage-oriented machismo for nothing more than pre-adolescent themes: Video games figure heavily and unironically in his raps and self-produced beats. Del's rhymes about bodily fluids and hygiene are callow enough to make Dr. Octagon seem like a real medical professional. The sexual, visceral voyeurism that gangsta rap provides is missing with Del--he reminds me of what a little brother might have been like if I'd had one.

Blackalicious is similarly quirky, with Gift of Gab waxing almost professorially over Xcel's intellectual beats. Like Del, Gift of Gab is an amazingly dexterous lyricist, to the point where his rhymes are often too sophisticated and too rapid to come through live. A Sacramento native, Gift of Gab is just as likely to rap about deeply personal struggles as he is to rhyme about communal themes. The latest Blackalicious album is called Nia, the Swahili word for "purpose," but Gift of Gab downplays its Zionist implications and describes the "purpose" in the title as his resolve to succeed after his battle with alcoholism. Once again, the political is shifted to the personal.

Del and Blackalicious revolt against the caricatures of mainstream hiphop by being self-contained, weirdly brilliant, and most of all, true to themselves. It makes for challenging entertainment, lacking the live connectivity of their Southern California compatriots; but like De La Soul once said, while everyone else is busy keeping it real, Del and Blackalicious are just "keeping it right."