Artist: X Clan
Best Album: Xodus
Best Song: Heed the Word of the Brother
This Letter Could Have Been About: The X-Ecutioners, Xzibit

Why I’m Writing About This Artist: I love that I genuinely had to think about what to choose to write about for X.  I suspect most people didn’t have many choices for this one, and a lot of them are cheating.  Nope!  I had three without even thinking about it, and I could probably come up with a few more if I tried for a few minutes.

One movement in hiphop that I haven’t talked about very much during these posts is Afrocentrism.  It came up in the Chuck D and Queen Latifah posts, if I remember right, but it wasn’t dwelled on.  Enter X Clan.  I still clearly remember seeing the video for Heed the Word of the Brother on Yo! MTV Raps for the first time, and it blew my damn mind.  Africa medallions were a thing back then, although as a chubby white kid there was absolutely no chance that I was ever going to own one much less wear it outside the house, but X Clan took Afrocentrism to an all-new level, filling their lyrics with references to Egyptian gods and African magic and ramping the political content (which I was already used to and comfortable with) to a new level.  They never saw a huge amount of commercial success, but they made a hell of an impact on me.

(Fun fact!  The one contribution I ever made to a lyrics website was for an X Clan song, where I was entertained by the sheer number of wrong ways people were misinterpreting the admittedly uncommon phrase “unguent jar.”  These guys got themselves some vocabulary.)

Have a video!:

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