Ill Poetic

Detail: "I do much of my songwriting on the Metro, and it feels like I go through damn near half the neighborhoods in Cincinnati," Ill Poetic says. "Looking out the window, you see such a wide spectrum of people and places, and daily it changes."

An example of his open window introspection is "Cinciluminati," a cozy cut of cryptic metaphors compiled off the head, all capturing snapshots of Cincinnati like a roving reporter. While riding buses, he envisioned the entire song and completed it before he reached his house. Lines like "turning churches into Urban Outfitters" and a reference to Price Hill as a "melting pot" when Queen City Barrel burned chronicle local infamy and irony.

The cuts on his albums have cryptic messages he says even his closest friends can't always encode, some spawned from personal pain and an unforeseen recording sabbatical away from his Hip Hop duo, Definition, with regular co-conspirator Zone Ill. These factors helped Ill Poetic define identity outside of the battling ciphers. For him, weekly battles became passé.

Still, his attention-grabbing appearance at Scribble Jam 2004 exposed Ill Poetic's music to a wider audience, which he realized when a kid at a show in Evansville, Ind., recognized him from the most recent Scribble Jam DVD. For him, the experience was surreal.