every rapper has to “quit” at least once in their career

Blue Scholars are down to every member I believe.

Lowkey definitely is. He’s a pretty prolific activist too on everything from Palestine to Grenfell, could always hold his own in the grime days, and has a track which features his discussion with .

Akala too. He was spitting revolutionary truth in the booth even back then, he’s put out plenty of bangers, goes hard even on chilled beats and now spends a lot of his time writing and talking about history and systemic racism. Here’s a PDF of his book on it.

Braintax is retired now but gets an honourable mention for putting out three great political British hip hop albums. He started out broadly as an anarchist, has always been explictly anti-imperialist, and got progressively more aware of capital as the enemy. Definitely some lib tendencies though.

Digable Planets for classic jazz hip-hop full of a communist references.

Bambu isn’t exactly subtle about it and reps Mao.

and The Coup obviously.

Paris is explicitly a black panther and anti-imperialist.

Pablo Hasél might be an an-com (I don’t speak enough Spanish) but was sent to prison last year for his anti-monarchy & revolutionary lyrics. There’s quite a few Spanish and particularly Catalan rappers jailed by the state for similar things or in exile elsewhere.

Marcel Cartier is a journalist who covered Syria and his music is very, very communist.

Check out Ghais Guevara, similar to JPEG and much more explicitly communist (also incredibly underrated)

Can’t forget about The Coup!