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St. Louis hip-hop: the city behind the catalog
This is the only page in this section that is not a map of somewhere else. TheIssa was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and the catalog starts here.
Where the music came from
Violin at about six years old, working through the Suzuki books to roughly Book 6, then trumpet in grade-school and high-school band. TheIssa credits band instructors with pushing him toward production and building his own soundtracks — the arrangement instinct in the records is a band-room instinct, not a laptop one.
The laptop arrived around 2013, for college. In 2015 a group of friends pushed him to take the songs seriously; he bought a Shure SM7B that year and has recorded steadily since.
These details come from TheIssa's own account and his project archive. They describe his training; they do not establish which instrument appears on any particular recording. Full sourced biography.
The archive has dates
Saved project files trace work on “Otherside” to June 2015 and “Diamonds” to August 2016. The 2019 archive includes “Eye of the Storm.” Later work runs through “Uncovering Myself” across late 2020 and into the records that became public releases.
What came out the other side: Sleeping Dragon I (2018, eight tracks public on YouTube), Decentralized (2022, released as Lium Amani), Sleeping Dragon II: Fledging Phoenix (2024, twenty tracks) and Enter The Empire (2025).
Where St. Louis music actually gets covered
St. Louis has an unusually strong public-radio habit of covering its own scene. Three outlets matter most if you are trying to follow local rap rather than national rap:
- St. Louis Public Radio, “St. Louis on the Air.” The station runs recurring new-music roundups of St. Louis artists — including hip-hop and R&B editions built from local hosts' picks — with a monthly rhythm rather than a one-off feature.
- Free4All. A multi-day, multi-venue festival across the Grand Center Arts District; the 2026 edition is listed for November 6–8 with roughly a hundred acts, and a St. Louis Public Radio stage among them.
- Trillion Little Pieces. Publishes an annual “Dopest Rappers from St Louis” list that functions as the de facto public roll call of the local scene.
Listed as research on where local coverage happens. No appearance, placement or submission is implied by this page.
The metro is wider than the city line
St. Louis rap is not one geography. The city and the inner-ring suburbs — Florissant, Ferguson, Hazelwood, University City — sit in one orbit; Clayton and Kirkwood in another; St. Charles and O'Fallon pull the metro west; and the Illinois side across the river has always been part of the same music scene even though it is a different state.
Geography, not biography: this describes the metro, not a claim about where any particular record was made.
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