Capital Rap

But, he says, the financial world's endemic sleaziness began to wear on him. "I saw what was going on with favoritism in the mutual funds," he says. "That's real gangsta shit."

After a couple of years, Jackson quit Dean Witter for reasons he declines to elaborate on, except to say that he "started to see a direct correlation between high finance and the hardship of people on a global scale."

He became a day trader for himself, family members, and friends. He snapped up tech stocks like Webvan, the cybergrocer, but "took a series of licks" and switched to safer blue-chip stocks.

Then a truly unthinkable set of events happened: Bush's son became president of the United States, Islamic fundamentalists attacked New York and Washington, D.C., Congress passed the Patriot Act, and a hyperaggressive Bush put America on what now seems like a permanent war footing.

Pissed off, Jackson returned to his Paris persona and hooked up with a group of Berkeley dot-commers who ran an alternative news service, Guerrilla News Network.

In 2002, Paris scored and narrated a GNN video documentary, Aftermath: Unanswered Questions About 9/11, which explores post-Sept. 11 mysteries, such as why U.S. fighter jets were not scrambled to shoot down the jetliners hijacked by al Qaeda. The video has played to packed houses in more than 20 cities in Europe and North America, including San Francisco.

After the dot-commers built a Web site for Paris, he stayed up nights blogging it. Guerrillafunk.com is hundreds of pages deep, filled with the rapper's thoughts on the origins of the Bush family, his advice on personal wealth-building, and links to dozens of articles on a wide range of political topics, including a number of conspiracy theories.

It was time for Paris, still a Muslim, to make jihad – with music.

This time around, though, the rapper understood that Americans were "not ready for a revolution. There is no black army. We might talk about overthrowing the system, but you can't if the mass of people do not want to do it."

But that does not mean they won't actively defend themselves against police repression or vote against the political party in power. "At its best, hip hop is aggressive and counterestablishment," notes Paris. So the erstwhile stockbroker decided to reach out to hip hop fans, especially young black ones, with an anti-corporate, anti-Republican, anti-major-record-label message. "In the black community," he says, "life imitates art, as hip hop carries a lot of weight."

It carries weight in white suburbs, too. The majority of American hip hop fans are, according to many consumer surveys, white people between the age of 14 and 34. The problem with commercial rap, says Paris, is its ludicrous content.

"You can ask elementary school kids to recite a 50 Cent or Eminem song, and they know every obscene lyric, but they do not know math," he laments.

For his comeback, Panther Paris wanted to influence all the hip hop lovers, to persuade them to "adopt an attitude of frustration and outrage instead of just parroting corporate America's objectives."

As usual, Paris employed the stylized hyperbole of hip hop to package his political message, hoping to make it digestible for millions of fans who he believes have been lulled to sleep mentally by the obscene banalities of commercial rap.

... when you killin' niggas on a record then you going places

But talk about killin' these crackas, you racist ...

Look into my eyes before I pull this trigger, I don't know what's worse

A black cracka or a white nigga, who should I do first? – "Ain't No Love (w/Kam)," Sonic Jihad

The burning question, though, is what does Paris really want his fans to do? Ultimately, he says, he hopes his art will "redefine black manhood," but he's quick to remind you that he is not a philanthropist, not the savior of the world. "This is not a hobby, it's to make money," he says firmly.

And in the parlance of hip hop, making money is the bling.

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Michael Franti, recording star and nonviolent revolutionary, gets visibly sad when he talks about the hip hop culture of over-the-top materialism. Even the music itself, he notes, has been co-opted by corporations.

"It's hard to observe how hip hop has changed over the last 15 years," said Franti, who performs regularly at Bay Area anti-war rallies, as he dressed for a concert (with his band, Spearhead) at the Warfield last month. "It was a political, cultural, spiritual force, a voice of the community. Now it's the voice of McDonald's, Reebok.

"Face it: Every teenage boy wants to get laid. The question is how to do it. Hip hop teaches him he needs a car, money; to be tough enough to outplay, outsmart.

"At the same time, hip hop has always been about making people dance, socialize. As a political songwriter, I cannot forget the importance of dance, humming along with the melody, planting seeds in the lyrics. Over time, when people enjoy music, the seeds take hold. Songs help to make the revolution."