Artist Of The Week – Guante

The Midwest is one of the country’s true hotbeds for hip-hop right now and Minnesota is the state that’s leading the way. After former Artist Of The Week Sketch Tha Cataclysm moved out there he immediately told me about Guante, a Minnesota-based emcee and poet who is originally from Wisconsin. I checked out some of Guante’s work and was really impressed. His most recent album is El Guante’s Haunted Studio Apartment, and he just finished up recording a collaboration with Big Cats! titled An Unwelcome Guest. He’s also working on a one-man spoken word theater show he hopes to debut in the spring, tentatively titled The Fist that Lives in Your Neck. Guante’s work qualifies as both unique and intense. A good example of this would be the way he describes An Unwelcome Guest, saying “it’s a concept album, a zombies-superhero-love-story-parable that deals with issues of displacement and violence as a tool for social change.” This week I caught up with Guante to find out more about his work, his causes, and why there’s a good chance he’s on a first name basis with his pizza delivery guy. Read more...