by Michael Alan Goldberg

Yo, Son!
Sundays at Chop Suey, $5.


It's Sunday afternoon, and Karim Panni won't have much time to lament his beloved 49ers' late-game breakdown against the Saints. The Seattle rapper and vice president of the local hiphop label Stuck Under the Needle Records is off to work. KEXP's studios are the first stop, where Panni, DJ Scene, and DJ B-Mello commandeer the mics for Street Sounds, this city's best hiphop radio show. After that, it's a jaunt up the hill to Chop Suey for Yo, Son!, SUTN's immensely popular club night that's been packin' the room with b-boys for nine months. Panni's barely had a chance to recover from SUTN's other weekly festivities--the new Uptown Saturday Nights at Nation--but as he watches Scene and DJ DV One rock the house, he knows their efforts could very well put Seattle hiphop back on the map in a big way.

The next day, the less glamorous but no less important work continues. Down in SUTN's Pioneer Square offices, Panni and his partners man the phones, line up distribution deals, figure out new marketing strategies, and prep the label's inaugural releases: a full-length LP from Sleep, a new 12-inch single from Boom Bap Project, and the reissue of Oldominion's 2000 disc, One (the latter two featuring Panni's prominent flow). After two years of building the label from the ground up, it's finally time to witness the payoff.

"It's a really exciting time for us," says Panni, who explains that Stuck Records and Under the Needle Records were separate entities that recently merged. "We've been waiting, just sitting on music. But everything is getting structured and organized, and we all realize what it takes to make it happen. The only person who really did it before us was Sir Mix-A-Lot, and he catapulted straight to the top. So we're trying to establish our own shit out here, keep it in the community, but at the same time reach out to our friends all over the country."

A native of San Francisco, Panni broke into the hiphop scene by doing promotions for a rap radio station. Moving north in the late '90s to hype shows in Eugene and Portland, he joined forces with Zac Johnson (now president of SUTN) and relocated to Seattle a couple of years ago, promoting concerts here but also devoting more time to his own beats and rhymes.

"We were just throwing shows and meeting other rappers, and then when we started taking the music thing seriously, they got behind us, just people that we knew and connections that we had."

Having friends in high places has helped the cause dramatically. The SUTN collective, now 20 MCs, DJs, and producers strong, has toured the U.S. three times in different configurations and played with some of the biggest names in hiphop--Busta Rhymes, OutKast, Eminem, Jurassic 5, Mos Def, and the Roots among them. Boom Bap Project even got members of Dilated Peoples, Blackalicious, and Beat Junkies to appear on their forthcoming album, due in the spring.

Though BBP's sound fits in perfectly with West Coast underground hiphop, Panni says SUTN as a whole isn't trying to tap into a specific scene, but rather develop different projects that have their own distinctive styles while employing essentially the same members.

"I wouldn't categorize it all as anywhere close to backpack rap," Panni chuckles. "Everyone has their own style of production, everyone's choosin' the beats they like and the topics they wanna rap about, so as far as differentiating, you'll get the vibe as soon as you hear two songs--you'll know what kind of project it is and what the main person was going for. Some of it's darker than other stuff, but we're just makin' music and letting it fall where it may."

Don't be surprised to hear the Stuck Under the Needle crew seize the moment--whether it's on KEXP or at Yo, Son! or Uptown Saturday Nights--to plug a wide array of shows and new releases (more than half a dozen) planned for the months ahead. They'll do whatever it takes to put the hiphop spotlight squarely on the Northwest.

"Any opportunity we have to promote, we do it," says Panni. "We're all pretty good at hustlin', just tryin' to talk to people and let 'em know our stuff's out there. But ultimately the music is fresh and dope, and it speaks for itself."