For few short days this summer hip-hop America got served. It was introduced to something much of the hip-hop world already knew: the Philippine All-Stars are the world’s best.

The Great Depression was suffocating the American dream. Civil War veterans rocked themselves to sleep on creaky wooden porches, while their neighbors nursed the scars of slavery. The nation was stuck between two world wars. The recently revived Ku Klux Klan had swelled to four million members. It was 1929 and Clarence Fountain came into the world with a cry that would someday wake the dead with its honeycovered gravel pleadings.