Various artists.(Krip Hop Mixtape, vol. 2: Look Past What You See)(Sound recording review)

Artist and activist Leroy Moore has built an international reputation as a passionate, articulate voice on the intersections of disability, race and sexuality and has extended this motivation to supporting the work of others through a dizzying array of cross-community collaborations. Seeing a huge gulf in the popular discourse around disability in hip-hop's language and performances, Moore, who is based in Berkeley, California, put out an e-mail and message-board call to disabled hip-hop artists who were interested in collaborating on projects and creating greater visibility for their work and ideas. The response was far greater than Moore anticipated and led to the creation of the well-received Krip Hop Mixtape Volume I in 2007. Ongoing communications with the participants and contact with newer artists only increased the need for a second project. Krip Hop Mixtape Volume 2: Look Past What You See was released in early 2008 and continues in the spirit of vitality and originality of the first project.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Independent rap compilations have an unfortunate tendency to be tedious, meandering, glaringly uneven in recording quality or a combination of the three. One of the biggest accomplishments of the Krip Hop series is that Moore and the participating artists have managed to present a series of cuts that are not only incredibly varied in aesthetic approach, but also intensely complicated about the lack of visibility of disabled people in popular media and the ways that is affected by overlapping issues of race, sex and class within hip-hop's cultural and social institutions.

The CD's material includes both literal and abstract conversations on the varied experiences of disabled populations, opening with self-proclaimed "first rapper on crutches" Preechman's acapella verse, "Feel My Pain," and the scathing chorus of 4 Wheel City's "Welcome To Reality" ("you think you hard/you think you god/you ...