UW-Madison’s Homegrown Hip-Hop Festival put our city on the map last year as a destination for the best regional hip-hop artists. This year, planners of the free, three-day fest hope to illustrate just how much the Midwest contributes to hip-hop across the country, from the small towns of Wisconsin to the clubs and record labels of New York and L.A.
Matt Forrest, a UW junior who launched the fest last year, says a great deal of the innovation going on in hip-hop now happens in the Great Lakes region, and not either coast. “One of our two headliners, Kid Sister, really embodies the Chicago sound, which has burst onto the national scene in the last year,” he says.