Rebel Central

The thing is, and as bullshit as it might sound, a concern with integrity was the glue that bound the label's Big Four creative team from the start: Wolf, Alapatt, Jank and their star artist, Madlib. The integrity touched on both the quality of the music they'd put out and the way in which their artists would be treated. In fact, you get a real sense from all of these guys that they'd rather work at Sav-on if they couldn't do the right thing by both the music and the people who created it.

Time passes, and Stones Throw struggles, scores, slumps, then rises again. Numerous solo albums by Madlib, the label's sonic Einstein (or "the Sun Ra of hip-hop," as labelmate Georgia Anne Muldrow calls him), are released — as well as many well-respected funk compilations such as Alapatt's L.A. Carnival project. All of these boost Stones Throw's critical cred if not quite its bank. Then — not out of nowhere — in 2004 the label released the brain-wiping 2004 Madvillain album, Madvillainy (featuring Madlib in collaboration with blunted former KMD rapper MF Doom). At last, something like success on a wider scale was in sight.

"Madvillain really turned things around for us," says Alapatt. "All of a sudden, things just changed drastically; the phone started ringing when it hadn't been ringing; we were getting contacts and opportunities that we'd never been given before."

Meanwhile, Peanut Butter Wolf had renewed his friendship with revered Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla, who'd famously crafted tracks with A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Busta Rhymes, De La Soul and his own excellent Slum Village. J Dilla's eventual move to L.A. resulted in his pairing with Madlib as Jaylib, and their 2003 Stones Throw release, Champion Sound, turned critical heads with a lotta fabulous beats, Bollywood-drenched samples and some pretty dubious vocalizing. (The two soundworld kingpins had decided to rap on a lark.) Back in instrumentalist mode, J Dilla followed up his Jaylib foray with the creation of his brutely gorgeous 2006 solo Donuts album, which has become a relatively massive seller for the label. (Dilla lost his battle with lupus in February 2006.)

Stones Throw rolls on, in fact seems now to be flying quite high. Through its personalized, creative-control-guaranteed distribution deal with Caroline (a division of EMI/Capitol), it has managed to get its product out worldwide (minus South America and parts of Asia and Africa, where fans are welcome to bootleg). Of course, its catalog has become a favored source of hip cachet for high-profile corporate and film and television creative consultants.

The impetus behind all of this freakily miscellaneous outpouring, meanwhile, remains the core belief in simply following one's intuitions. Paying heed to the history of African-American music while reinventing what hip-hop may mean to us in the future. But for all that, this music rarely strikes one as self-consciously avant-garde; the point, if there is one, seems far simpler: Retro or futuro, we'll do it any effin' way we em-effin' feel.

On that score, young Aloe Blacc perfectly represents the accessibly modern jumble of styles that define the Stones Throw way of life. His new Shine Through is a whole different kettle o' fish again, with the singer–multi-instrumentalist offering a soulful, lyrical approach to both party-down and high-conscious raps — and singing. It's all set to music whose source of heat is in essence hip-hop, but which has mutated with odd strains of jazz and funk and rock psychedelia, and most notably salsa-fied realms that tip a hat to his Panamanian heritage.

But let's give a woman the last word on the subject of the ever-elusive key to the Stones Throw sound. One of the label's recent signings is Georgia Anne Muldrow, formerly with L.A./N.Y. production team Sa Ra Creative Partners and Detroit's Platinum Pied Pipers. She's a Nina Simone–ish poet–rapper–singer– keyboardist–recording engineer of extraordinarily fresh and unusual gifts who shakes the foundations of poetic song/classic soul/R&B convention on her exhilarating Olesi: Fragments of an Earth disc.

"I love doing it all," Muldrow says, laughing. "I like to write. I've always been surrounded by beautiful poets in my life. But I don't know what kind of stuff I do; I just do like what has to come out of me, you know? I don't necessarily disagree with nobody else's views, everybody who's doing hip-hop, that's great; everybody who's doing jazz, that's great. I'd just rather have something relevant to some kind of revolution of my own." Sounds like an attitude she shares with her labelmates at Stones Throw.

"Everybody's trying to find the perfect groove," says Muldrow. "Everybody's got to find that perfect beat, with their big mouth to the 'phone. I think the message is everybody's a rebel, you know, and I love that. Stones Throw is Rebel Central. And there's beautiful things that come with that."

A few crucials from the Stones Throw roster — though it's pretty much ALL GOOD: