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Stagga Lee
Biography
In the early 2000s, ARTISTdirect Records signed at least two promising white rappers. One of them was Poverty, a very sociopolitical, somewhat KRS-1-ish MC from Portland, OR. Another was Stagga Lee, a native of Yonkers, NY (just north of New York City) who has cited Nas and Kool G. Rap as major inspirations. Stagga has a very East Coast-sounding flow, and unlike some white rappers--the Beastie Boys and the White Boys, for example--he doesn't sound white. The MC gets his name from the song "Stagger Lee," which was a #1 hit for R&B/blues singer Lloyd Price in 1957.

Stagga started rapping publicly when he was 16; he had been rapping before that, but not in front of live audiences. One person who gave him a lot of encouragement during his high school years was his friend Scratch, who produced some demos for Stagga on a four-track recorder. After dropping out of high school, Stagga didn't pursue a career in the music industry right away; instead, he enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed in Georgia and South Carolina. When Stagga's stay in the military ended, he returned to the New York City area and resumed his hip-hop activity. At that point, he got heavily into battle rhymes--that is, confrontational dissing rhymes aimed at rival MCs.