Immortal Technique

Felipe Coronel came into the world in 1978 inside a military hospital in Lima, Peru. His parents brought him to Harlem at the age of two. Although he first experimented with rapping at nine, he only began treating the craft with genuine focus once he reached high school. Repeated run-ins with the law marked his teenage years, yet he still secured admission to Penn State University. An arrest soon cut short his studies and resulted in a full year behind bars. There he examined the ideas and experiences of revolutionaries including Che Guevara and Malcolm X while pouring his attention into songwriting.

Paroled in 1999, he returned to New York and divided his time between assorted day jobs and evening rap battles that displayed his combative and sharply worded delivery. Fearing he would be seen as a limited talent, he concentrated on shaping complete songs and pairing them with fitting beats, which led to the 2001 appearance of his debut Revolutionary, Vol. 1. His own imprint Viper Records reissued the project in 2004, after which Babygrande handled another edition the following year. The album and his tireless promotion brought neighborhood attention along with The Source’s “unsigned hype” nod in November 2002. Revolutionary, Vol. 2 followed in 2003. He had spoken of delivering a third album by 2005, yet listeners received nothing substantial until summer 2007, when The Middle Passage arrived apart from scattered singles and mixtapes.