anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, 
       a group, a label, a stable of men.
anticon was a movement, a moment, an underground scene,
       a business, a base, a stance against the status quo.

anticon was a voice, a mic, a 4-track backing track,
        a collective, a corrective, a fix for the pre-millennium 
        tension.
anticon was a concept, a conspiracy, a crew on a mission,
       a shout, a scream, a call out to listen

anticon was a scam, a hoax, a marketing plan destined to fail,
        a process, a project, a product for sale.
anticon was a wave, a wormhole, a wish for acceptance.
        a way forward, a way out, a way away from the present tense.

Call them a collective, a crew, or any and all of the above, anticon started with collaborations and compilations from different points on the map (Maine, Cincinnati, Chula Vista, Chicago, and parts unknown), but on the cusp of the new millennium, they got it all together in the grey area of the Bay Area. Now, underground scholar Joseph Rathgeber has compiled their definitive history.

One rapper I talked to called him “a professor of word salad,”¹ but Rathgeber’s loosely aphoristic, epigrammatic style wanders somewhere between the manic musings of Dave Tompkins and the futuristic philosophy of Rammellzee. Like me, he matriculated in the zine trade and graduated to books.

Joseph Rathgeber: As a zine press, Caltrops has been actively documenting and analyzing the underground rap renaissance since 2020, disseminating handmade zines direct from the kitchen table to the rest of the world. Catch Us Before We Fall Off inaugurates Caltrops Press as a publisher of hip-hop books.²

Rathgeber’s Caltrops zines have been a steady wealth of in-depth analysis of some of the most obtuse recent releases by some of the most complex and compelling underground artists of the decade: billy woods, ELUCID, Fatboi Sharif, Armand Hammer, and ShrapKnel, among others. Yo, kid kinda nice.

doseone: Joe [Rathgeber] is part person, part pen. Someone who grows because of other’s writing and grows wilder still within his own. It’s an honor to have our creativities intertwine…³

One could estimate the impetus of anticon’s beginnings in the game, but like some lo-fi, hip-hop, jazz version of Genesis or The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Apogee (doseone, Yoni Wolf, Josiah Wolf, and Mr. Dibbs) represents the direct precursor to anticon’s most known and most creative period. They recorded everything and yet the only tape one might find is a bootleg, a testament to the sporadic and ephemeral nature of the hydra-headed genius(es) at work here. Their improvised, theatrical rehearsals and performances—decidedly interchangeable designations—collected the scraps of previous projects and composed the compost from which grew others. The later assemblies of different members included Deep Puddle Dynamics (doseone, Sole, and Alias, as well as Slug of Atmosphere and Rhymesayers Entertainment; another candidate for the coalescence of the collective), Themselves, cLOUDDEAD (another one), Why?, subtle, Reaching Quiet, So-Called Artists, Greenthink, and so on—row, row, row, rotating rosters. It was all a beautiful mess at best, a catalog of risks, “some careless, some calculated,”⁴ with pregnant promises of vision and never getting paint on spectacles again.⁵

“My dream would be to see a movie of just live studio footage of some of my favorite records being made with no commentary or anything, just a good behind-the-scenes look — all the arguments and the epiphanies.”⁶
— Yoni Wolf

Rathgeber has ingested that mess, investigated that dream, and interrogated those responsible—all of it and all of them, which resulted in a 1,200-page, two-volume mega-tome. Part prose-poetic pastiche, part oral history, Catch Us Before We Fall Off: A [Ch]oral History of anticon. (Caltrops Press, 2026) is the kind of deep dig you wish someone would do on all of your favorite artists, bands, collectives, labels—an excavation of all the burial sites, an autopsy of all the bodies. For fans of all things anticon, this is the definitive history, “an audacious document of a pivotal moment in hip-hop history.”

Jel: It wasn’t being played on the radio, but it was bumping at the Scribble Jam.⁷

The lore is true. Scribble Jam is another gravesite in this ruined geography, another node in this invisible network. Starting in 1996 in a parking lot, Scribble Jam hosted and boasted some of the most legendary battles in hip-hop’s short history. Emcees, DJs, beatboxers, and B-boys all battled for underground supremacy. Artists like Juice, Eminem, and Rhymefest, as well as anticon artists like doseone and anticon-adjacent artists like DJ Abilities, Eyedea, and Sage Francis made or built their names exchanging weaponized wordplay and battle-sharpened skills at Scribble Jam’s many hectic melees.

Archived by any means, many of anticon’s early documents were recorded on 4-track tape machines, what Rathgeber, channeling Marshall McLuhan, describes as “medium and message, DIY, unbridled bedroom creativity spinning around magnetic tape spools.”⁸ I, too, once compared the “primitive and unadorned nature” of anticon’s output to adjacent lo-fi indie-rock outfits hiding behind the same wow and flutter: Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Hood (the latter of whom would collaborate with members of the collective). In similar spirit, theirs was not an aesthetic choice but a necessary one. With an excess of output from the rhymers-only room, the 4-track bridged the bay between process and product, between the ether and something tangible, between table talk and a cassette tape. The hiss was the ignorance of which bliss is made.

“I tested my chassis on the road and drove faster accordingly.” — doseone

Dan Hancox: doseone is the label’s most out-there, artful rapper, and his ghostly, nasal rhymes are the centrepiece to the bizarre compositions of Themselves. The distorted drones and drum samples, clunking pipes, feedback and abrupt time signatures of “It’s Them” and “Live Trap” do to hip-hop what Columbus did to world geography. Such experimental creations will not be to everyone’s tastes, but repay repeated listening—with not a gold necklace in sight.⁹

Alias: Who the hell’s that guy?¹⁰

Rathgeber describes doseone’s style as “an invitation to get lost in the funhouse,” an invitation “to be riveted by the skillset, rapt by the rapping,” and adds, “sometimes the mental plane which doseone operates on feels unreachable, his messages utterly abstruse.”¹¹ dose’s style is varied, verbose, sometimes sing-songy, sometimes chanty… It’s shanti, shanti, all over the rap; divisive, polarizing, an affront to all those frontin’ on the mic.

If music fandom is radically subjective, then hip-hop fandom is even more so. I’ve been in many discussions where mentioning anticon was anathema, I’ve been in several situations where admitting to liking them was an irreversible faux pas. To quote Hua Hsu in The Wire, anticon “embodies all the fascinating contradictions which both sustain and complicate the culture.”¹² As pedestrian puts it in his Foreword to Catch Us Before We Fall Off, “In the vacuum of crew, molecules of burning gas will as a rule go solo. And so, a posse cuts both ways, loosens into them and you, now uniquely incomplete.” And from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark…”¹³ Deep lines were drawn, not in sand but hella underground.

Their underground was “twilit tunnels and secret passages”¹⁴ from trading tapes to downloading songs, from CDs to mp3s. Their underground saw a seismic shift, the tectonics of an industry in upheaval, where ever-new forms of bootlegs were balms and “clandestine comforts.”¹⁵ Their underground was both burden and boon.

Sole: Underground music was tape trades and Napster. The whole groundwork for a market existing for the label came out of widespread sharing of that music.¹⁶

anticon was baptized by bandwidth, they stepped from one era to the next over the cataclysm of the internet. Adapting to the new tech as they adopted it, anticon took advantage of the early bit trade. Downloaded on the down low, spreading at the speed of P2P, their music moved from around the way to around the world through wires and wormholes alike.

“It was as if we came home from a semester at sea with nothing to eat but dreams.”
— pedestrian

Rathgeber finally describes the anticon aesthetic as “a fleeting moment in time—rap-as-literature; sonics-and-phonics thoroughly plundered; altruistically allusive and relentlessly referential; an irreverent and foolish yet holy pursuit of art.”¹⁷ Maybe it was just “a fleeting moment,” but maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the attitude. Maybe it was the Sole/El-P feud. Maybe it was just too many halfway crooks in their kitchen. Whatever it was and whatever you think of them, they followed their own path accompanied by their own drums. Like the Wu-Tang Clan before them and Odd Future after, anticon came together for a brief period, jumped in the deep puddle, splashed spectacularly, rippled to the edges, and then subsided.

dosone: The whole paper towel was wet with our experiment.¹⁸

anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, but if you’re interested in indie discourse and rhymes outside the lines, Rathgeber’s Catch Us Before We Fall Off interjects anticon back into the history, the conversation, the cypher.

Roy Christopher: You and I came to this writing racket making our own zines. Aside from that, what’s your background?

Joseph Rathgeber: My mother recently found my fourth grade report card. My teacher, Ms. Kroll, wrote, “Joseph is doing as little as possible.” That was an accurate assessment. When it’s come to education and employment, I’ve been unmotivated and directionless. Near the end of high school, I had to be reminded to apply to college, and I only worked enough (washing cars) to afford a weekly plate of fries from Six Brothers Diner (R.I.P.). When my parents threatened to kick me out of their home, that Atmosphere lyric that goes “I rather live in a tent than bust my ass to pay the rent” was all the ideology I needed.

Ultimately, I got an English degree from a state school here in New Jersey. Again, no thoughts of a “career” in mind. I was reading poems, plays, and novels anyway, so it made sense to do so in the pursuit of a degree. I also had a concentration in Creative Writing, which just means I took a lot of workshop classes and minimized my workload even further. I found plenty of time to do what I really wanted to do, which was record rap music. I also started writing about music in the form of record reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes. Anyway, with no career options to speak of after college graduation, my girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to pursue the “alternate route” to teacher certification. Basically, you find a teaching job at a Catholic or private school and complete night classes during the first year of employment. That job also paid for me to get a Master’s a couple years later. They didn’t even require it be a Master’s in Education, so of course I went for English. I was encouraged to continue toward a PhD or MFA, but, again, the motivation wasn’t there and neither was the money.

At that point, I was still paying off my student loans from undergrad. When I first started writing about billy woods’ music in 2021, he made some good-natured crack about me being on sabbatical for the semester, and then something about me being the department chair. I like to think of that compliment as my framed PhD diploma. In reality, I teach high school kids how to analyze literature. I also constantly urge them to consider diverging from their predicted life path. It’s noble work.

RC: Aside from the zines, you’ve written other books in the past. Why a book on anticon and why now?

JR: I’ve been pretty vocal about how this anticon book is a decade in the making, so “why now” feels interminable. When I first conceived the idea, it was because I had great affection for the music that emerged from anticon’s salad days, roughly between 1996 and 2003. I had some thoughts about hip-hop and otherwise that I wanted to explore through them and their work, but at some indeterminate point the vision for the project began to swell. I like to be thorough, and so my vision for the project went from something manageable to monstrous as I decided I had to write about all the music from that period and tell the stories of all the players.

Eventually I decided to have the players tell the tale themselves. Suddenly, I realized I was juggling both an oral history and a critical commentary. The former required that I learn how to make contacts with artists, conduct interviews, and integrate those transcripts into a narrative. Bear in mind I had no real experience to speak of and had to slowly prove my credibility to these people, not to mention earn their trust as I ventured deeper into the project. Ultimately what resulted was an unwieldy conglomeration. The result is Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home biography of Dylan and Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man analysis of his body of work in one. It’s Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces subcultural commentary and the oral history of Please Kill Me combined.

I’m a fool, frankly, for even attempting this. Nonetheless, I got it done and I feel more than good about it. A more direct answer to “why now?” would be that over this decade of working on the book anticon has been absent from the story. Retrospectives of late ‘90s/early 2000s underground hip-hop include the likes of Fondle ‘Em, Rawkus, Def Jux, SoleSides, Hiero, and others, but anticon has been routinely and, in my view, deliberately omitted. The book examines why that is while inserting them back into that conversation in the process.

RC: How did you get into zine-making in the first place?

JR: Like most, I’ve always appreciated the DIY nature of zines. As I became more and more disillusioned with publishing poetry and fiction through the conventional means and processes, I decided life’s too short to fill out submission forms and wait months or even years for responses, be they rejections or acceptances. That traditional way worked fine for a time, specifically when I was young and seeking validation from institutions and perceived authorities in the field. But zines and chapbooks were more immediate, and the medium matched the urgency of the art.

I will say this: I have received far more validation, praise, and opportunities in the years I’ve been doing things myself and on my own terms. And I’m always going to prize the tangibility of zines, the intimate pasting, folding, stapling, and mailing of an artifact that is transferred to someone else’s hands. Those things will last. Podcast episodes will soon be lost in the ether.

RC: What’s next for Joseph Rathgeber and Caltrops Press?

JR: Personally, I’m champing at the bit to write fiction again. Between the anticon books and the underground hip-hop renaissance I’ve been documenting over the last six years, I’m very eager to open up the notebook with all the story ideas I’ve had to look away from until these current projects reached a conclusion. I have been writing plenty of poetry over these years, though, so I’m sitting on a couple of manuscripts and trying to figure out what to do with those. I also miss doing public readings.

As for Caltrops Press, the plan is to continue publishing books about hip-hop. The next one will be a book about the work of Armand Hammer and billy woods and ELUCID as solo artists, also written by me. That’s basically done and will come out Spring 2027 if, as DOOM once said, everything goes according to plan, man. I want to open up the press to proposals by other writers, but I’m intimidated by anything “business” related and don’t have the wherewithal to send out 1099s and all that shit, so it’ll have to be people I’m close with first. Caltrops, as a zine, just hit issue 30, and I don’t plan to stop there.

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Notes:

1. Interview with the author, September 15, 2026. ↩︎
2. Joseph Rathgeber, “Book Release: Catch us Before we Fall Off,” Caltrops Press Substack, September 8, 2026. ↩︎
3. Interview with the author, September 15, 2026. ↩︎
4. Joseph Rathgeber, Catch Us Before We Fall Off, Vol. 1, Caltrops Press, 2026, 2. ↩︎
5. cLOUDDEAD, “I Promise Never to Get Paint on My Glasses Again” [10” EP], Mush Records, 2001.
   ↩︎
6. Quoted in Roy Christopher, “Yoni Wolf and Richard Adams: The Sound of a Handshake” (pp. 211-215) in Roy Christopher (ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear, 2007, 214. ↩︎
7. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026. ↩︎
8. Rathgeber, 2026, Vol. 1, 334. ↩︎
9. Dan Hancox, “The Download,”  New Statesman, London Vol. 18, Iss. 849, March 7, 2005, 43; The gold-chain thing is a whole other story. ↩︎
10. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 555. ↩︎
11. Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 100. ↩︎
12. Hua Hsu, “Anticon: Hip-hop’s Oddball Alliance,” The Wire, #200, October 2000. ↩︎
13. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, New York: Putnam, 1962, 61. ↩︎
14. Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 17. ↩︎
15. Ibid. ↩︎
16. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 1, 2026, 567-8. ↩︎
17. Rathgeber, Catch Us Before We Fall Off, Vol. 2, Caltrops Press, 2026, 496 ↩︎
18. Quoted in Rathgeber, Vol. 2, 2026, 565. ↩︎