It's pointless for a radio disc jockey to announce the names of rappers on new hiphop tracks, because rappers always state who they are, which year they are in, and, most importantly, where they are from. This compulsion to affirm and reaffirm the exact position from which one is addressing the music-listening pubic is peculiar to hiphop. It doesn't happen in, say, soul music--not one song by Diana Ross, for example, ever mentioned that she came from the Brewster Housing Projects in Detroit. But if Diana Ross had been a rapper like Lauryn Hill, this would have been established within minutes of her first hit song.

"I have to say where I'm from because I have to unite my experience, my neighborhood, with hiphop," says local rapper Merciful. Like all rappers, from Stuttgart to Tokyo, Merciful represents at every opportunity the streets, rooms, courts, and circumscribed spaces where the various dramas of his urban existence are played out. Merciful's grid is specific: It runs from 18th and Union down to 23rd and Madison, and stretches back to 23rd and Rainier and MLK and Rainier. I listened to his new CD, Fugazi/East Union Street Hustlers after he handed it to me on the corner of Broadway and Pike (just beyond his grid) a few weeks ago, and was immediately impressed by the easy elasticity of his flow, the firmness of the production-- which was done by Vitamin D in his studio, the Pharmacy, on MLK and Olive--and his total commitment to South Seattle as a location to be mapped out and colonized by the hiphop imagination.

"You see, people have a conception about Seattle that is all about Microsoft and Amazon, and, yeah, in a way it is all about Microsoft and Amazon. But what about the other things? People don't know about blacks living here. I mean, a lot of people don't know there was a bank here called Liberty Bank that was a black bank," he says, pointing a finger in a southwest direction from the porch of his brother's home and record shop, on 1412 24th Avenue and Madison Street. "Or that Seattle had the second largest chapter of the Black Panther party. To talk about the trees and mountains and Microsoft is to not speak about my people who came into this neighborhood [the Central District] many years ago and made it what it is today."

If Source of Labor's hiphop is inspired by the kind of African socialism articulated by African leaders like the late Julius Nyerere, and the Silent Lamb Project is inspired by a placeless, Marxist, surrealist vision of black fate, then Merciful's hiphop is inspired by a system of streets that form and code the more colorful side of the city. And he describes these beloved streets in almost pop-hiphop terms. Merciful makes catchy and melodic music; he never leaves the dance, as is the case with so much underground hiphop, but is committed to a driven dance groove through which he weaves the names of blocks and avenues within his grid--23rd and Union, MLK and Yesler, and so on.

I asked Merciful about Butterfly from Digable Planets, whose popular 1993 song "Where I'm From" failed to mention that he was from Seattle, and instead went on about Brooklyn. "Yeah, he is in the closet about coming from Seattle. He went to Garfield with all of us, and used to play hoop. He was filthy! He had crossovers and shakes before Allen Iverson. He used to break people's ankles, and they'd be all dizzy, saying, 'Where the ball go? Where the ball go?' Then Ishmael [Butler-- Butterfly's actual name] suddenly came out with 'I'm cool like dat,' and saying he's from New York.... But I got to give the brother a break. He had the same dilemma that many rappers have when they start here: They can't get their kick off, so they go somewhere else and claim they are from there. Even Jimi Hendrix had to do that. But me, I'm going to claim S.E.A., the H206, until the wheels fall off."

Like Paul Allen, Merciful sees Seattle as something he must reconstruct, incorporate, and impress his identity on. "I have to represent this place. I have to connect all of this up with the rest of hiphop. My grandmother bought a house in this area in the 1930s, and so blacks have been here developing the place long before those other developers. And we have developed our own way of doing things. Seattle blacks are Seattle blacks. We have a different style from other cats, so that's why we have to let them know how we do it over here."