“We were putting a lot of pressure on trying to get signed,” Wilkis recalls of WPP. “But we stopped paying attention to how to play a show. [We were] thinking ‘This guy is gonna be there, that guy might show up,’” he says.

“Buildups, letdowns – everybody was ready to move on,” Wilkis asserts. “We did it for three years. It made my college life so much better. But it had to end.” The group disbanded.

Tha League’s reasoning was nearly identical: “We weren’t necessarily trying to follow that route,” Deleon says. “We wanted to go our own route. We got interest faster from people that could help us because they saw we were doing our own thing.” The group split after graduation.

It would seem that the Paul Barman school of staying true to one’s artistic whims can only take an artist so far. But the problem isn’t exclusive to the “Harvard bubble.” It might be a city-wide phenomenon.

‘BIG WORDS AND BAD BEATS’

“The problem is, right now, Boston hip-hop is unbalanced,” Cublunk says. “You get all these college kids coming to town, wanting to see what our city is about, and they cram 7L & Esoteric [an underground MC/producer duo] down their throats.”

“Now that’s all good hip-hop, but it’s the same thing as saying, ‘All we have here in Boston is big words and bad beats,’” he says.

Cublunk says that the Boston underground may be pushing the musical envelope, but is alienating Boston from widespread recognition.

He says the city is a bizarre reversal of traditional regional hip-hop politics: the underground artists are dominating the audiences, at the expense of what he calls “the so-called ‘hood rappers’, the kids from the streets, telling their stories.”

“I love underground hip-hop,” he says. “But in Boston, the more mainstream, basic, beat-driven hip-hop is being pushed underground by the underground.”

Cublunk gives an example: a concert at the Middle East featuring Brooklyn hardcore rap legends M.O.P. Instead of presenting their beat-heavy street tales, the hip-hop duo, at the request and advice of the promoters, brought a rock band to the concert in order to appeal to the college crowd. The mixture didn’t work.

Cublunk says that these kinds of compromises happen all the time, and they prevent the college audience from being exposed to other Boston styles. “They need to see the real scene. And the promoters and the underground rappers need to stop being scared about it,” said Cublunk.

THE YOUNG BREED

Today, at least two Harvard-based acts are trying to buck the trends.

You may not recognize the name of Samuel M. Zornow ’08, but his alias is well-known among Harvard party-goers: He goes by the nom de plume of “DJ Shiftee,” and he might be Harvard hip-hop’s best hope.