Hip-Hop House Specials

Indie hip-hop has more to do with indie rock than radio rap: both are self-satisfied, somewhat delusional and completely comfortable with themselves. An old couch might give you lice, but so what? Misogyny's a tough tumor, violence haunts and the lexicon of hardcore rap can leave listeners in a wilderness of slang without a canteen or a machete. Plus, some people just don't like club music.

If fast-paced trends offend your spiritual pillars of artistry or creativity, you've still got to admit that major-label hip-hop manages to do one thing that would seem the privilege of an indie approach: to rebel against itself. Even so, indie hip-hop's audience knows what they want-something different from the mainstream, even if it's a nice puddle in the backyard.

Atlanta's Scott Herren (Prefuse 73) made his mini-revolution with 2001's Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, an album that chopped MC vocals into a hail of buckshot spraying over sputtering digital beats. The approach had more in common with techno's then-fetish for glitch music (the album was actually released on Warp, an English label dealing largely in experimental electronic dance music). And thus began the transformation from New Item to House Special. Which is fine-Prefuse isn't playing "Carry on My Wayward Son" at the state fair, but his fans aren't exactly looking for free jazz, either.

Edan's music, while self-consciously retro, often sounds fresher. His blueprint takes cues from Prince Paul at the dawn of the daisy age-De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising-lacing simple hip-hop beats with a tingling psychedelic pop fringe. Of course, the context is different: De La wanted a rap revolution, while Edan-who recently graced the cover of English avant-garde music magazine Wire-knows that his core fans are probably sensitive record geek-types high on the plumes of his '60s-styled daydreams, more "Crimson and Clover" than "Gin and Juice."

At a recent show in his hometown of Boston, he layered the beat from Wild Style with the Velvet Underground's "There She Goes"; his MC said: "This is the Velvet Underground and shit. I like this shit. Lemme see if I can make it funky." In Edan's hands, it seems altogether possible.

May 7. Southpaw, 125 5th Ave. (betw. Sterling & St. Johns Pl.), B'klyn, 718-230-0236; 8, $15.