Do you remember E-40?

Well, here is what he's been up to lately. Check out the report in NPR.

E-40: At 43, The Rap Virtuoso Plays On
by Andrew Noz

For more than two decades, hip-hop veteran E-40 has made his trade in reality raps and linguistic experiments. He's only proven stronger for the wear. The new third and fourth installments in his Revenue Retrievin' series of albums, called Overtime Shift and Graveyard Shift, follow last year's Day Shift and Night Shift; like their predecessors, both were released separately on the same day. It's an unorthodox approach, but E-40 has never been much for orthodoxy.

"Unique people love the way I speak," he boasts in "E Forty," from Graveyard Shift. E-40 raps fast in a cracking and permanently quizzical tone, often teetering on Porky Pig levels of exasperation. On his 13th and 14th albums, he bends rhythm to his will and strings run-on sentences into long conversations with himself. In a recent interview with Complex Magazine, Ice Cube compared E-40's style to "that graffiti that you can't read but you know it's dope." It's an acquired taste that alienates some East Coast rap purists, but it's also earned the California rapper a fair share of acolytes on his home turf and across smaller markets.

In terms of subject matter, E-40 rarely transcends the typical gangsta tropes: loyalty, betrayal, neighborhood pride, hustles both legal and illegal, substance-abuse capacity, sexual exploits. But he makes it his goal to stretch these topics well past their logical extremes through a sheer love for the elasticity of language. His catalog is built around sputtering, intertwined streams of obscure street slang and SAT words. While he's clearly a thesaurus fiend, E-40 hardly limits himself to existing words or the laws that bind them. Instead, he morphs them to levels of absurdity that would make Dr. Seuss proud.

Check out the full story on NPR