Subtitle

Born Giovanni Marks, Subtitle came of age amid the difficult streets of Compton and Lynwood in Los Angeles. At fourteen he relocated northward to Camarillo and enrolled in school in neighboring Oxnard—the same city that produced Madlib and the rest of Lootpack—where he began composing rhymes, crate-digging, and immersing himself in the West Coast underground hip-hop scene. Once back in Los Angeles, his brother introduced him to the storied Project Blowed open-mic sessions; in 1997 he and his crew the Library took the stage there. Shortly afterward Subtitle departed the group to concentrate on the West Coast Workforce, whose roster included Radioinactive, Anti_MC, Xololanxinxo, Premonition, and DJ Memorex—the latter two of whom had previously been part of the Library.

A few years later he stepped away from the Workforce to join forces with the Shapeshifters, take jobs in record shops, serve as tour DJ for the Mars Volta, and lay down tracks both with his side project Lab Waste alongside Thavius Beck and for what he intended as his own debut album. A computer crash while finishing mixes for the project, titled I’m Always Recovering from Tomorrow, erased the recordings and postponed its release. His proper first album, Young Dangerous Heart—containing re-recorded versions of many of those lost songs—finally appeared on Gold Standard Labs in 2005. The following year he released Terrain to Roam on Alpha Pup, an album that featured production contributions from Nobody, Dntel, and Madlib; after its completion Marks announced it would be Subtitle’s final output, though he planned to keep issuing music under his given name and through Lab Waste.