Built for the Love

Home of Homegrown Hip-Hop Since 2001

Before Crosslabelz was a name, a catalog or a record label, hip-hop was already raising me.

It taught me about life before I had lived enough of it to understand what life was. Through hip-hop, I learned about women, relationships, school, spirituality, survival, confidence and the complicated process of becoming yourself. The music gave you an attitude, but it also gave you an identity. It told the world something about you before you ever opened your mouth. The sneakers you wore, the way you dressed, the tapes you carried and the artists you defended all became part of your language.

More importantly, hip-hop gave people a way to recognize one another. You could meet somebody who looked completely different from you, came from somewhere else and wanted something entirely different from life, but the moment you discovered that you listened to the same artist, there was a connection. You belonged to the same culture. At an age when everybody was trying to figure out who they were and where they fit, hip-hop gave us somewhere to stand.

My own journey into that culture began before Crosslabelz and before Strizzy88. I had been rapping since I was ten or eleven, writing little Kriss Kross-inspired rhymes and playing with words without knowing where any of it would lead. The deeper transformation came around 1995 and 1996, when I started going online under the name Euphony the Divine.

IRC and AOL opened a door that television never showed me. I would enter hip-hop chat rooms and find people discussing artists, records and scenes that never appeared on MTV or BET. Until then, most of what reached me had come through the mainstream. Those online spaces revealed an entire underground network of independent music, regional scenes, homemade releases and artists who cared more about originality than acceptance.

One moment from those years stayed with me. Around 1997, I was in an AOL hip-hop room talking about a new Puff Daddy song. I said I liked it, and somebody in the room laughed.

“Ha ha ha.”

I could not understand what was funny. It was a good song. Why were they acting as if I had said something ridiculous?

They told me it was trash.

That did not instantly make me stop liking the record, but it made me curious. What had these people heard that gave them a completely different standard? What were they comparing it to? What existed beyond the music being handed to me?

That little exchange became part of a much larger search—a search for more, a search for something new, a search for alternatives and eventually a search for my own place within the culture I loved.

I began moving away from the obvious channels and toward college radio, independent releases, underground shows and late-night discoveries. I found KRS-One and I Got Next, an album that completely changed the way I understood what an MC could represent. KRS-One spoke about hip-hop as more than entertainment. It was knowledge, discipline, history, responsibility and culture. He carried the four elements with him even when he stood on a mainstream stage.

From there, the world kept opening. While other people were listening to whatever was dominating radio, I was searching for MF DOOM, O.C., Killah Priest, Pumpkinhead, Cage, Hieroglyphics and lyrical artists from different corners of the country. I followed the early tension surrounding Cage and Eminem. I was telling people about Eminem before most of my high school knew who he was. I became the person who was always coming back with another rapper, another tape, another style or another piece of the culture that people around me had not encountered yet.

I was not searching for obscurity simply to say I knew something other people did not. I was searching because every discovery showed me another way an artist could exist. Underground hip-hop gave people permission to be specific, strange, intellectual, aggressive, spiritual, funny, conceptual, regional, awkward or completely themselves. There was no single mold you had to enter before you were allowed to create.

That freedom shaped the artist I became.

Euphony did not last long. Somebody saw the name and turned it into “You Phony”—Y-O-U-P-H-O-N-Y. I remember thinking, What do you mean? I was still experimenting, still reaching for something that sounded like me. The name changed to Lady D and then Lady Deathstrike, inspired by Yuriko Oyama, the DC Universe character connected to Wolverine. I became so immersed in that character and her story that I created an entire conceptual project around Yuriko.

Eventually, Lady Deathstrike became Strizzy88.

Every name represented a stage in discovering who I was lyrically and what I wanted to say. My music was raw, direct and willing to go into territory women were not always expected to occupy. If something was supposedly reserved for male rappers to say, I wanted the freedom to say it too. I could be aggressive in one song, funny in another and deeply spiritual in the next. I wanted to connect ideas, tell stories, build characters and make entire albums around concepts rather than treating every song as an isolated moment.

That search also carried me beyond rapping. Once you fall far enough into hip-hop, you begin digging. You want to know where the drums came from, what record was sampled, why a particular bassline feels familiar and how a producer turned a few seconds of forgotten music into an entirely new world.

I bought my first MPC and my first MIDI keyboard and began teaching myself production. There was no endless library of instant tools waiting to finish the work for you. You used the equipment you had. You sampled what you could find. You experimented until something felt right. Sometimes the limitations became part of the sound.

That spirit—creating with what was available and refusing to wait for perfect conditions—became the foundation of Crosslabelz.

From approximately 2001 through 2009, Crosslabelz became my home base for creative freedom. More than 250 songs came out of that period.

We made music because making music felt good.

The reward was finishing a new beat, putting it into the car and telling a friend, “Listen to this.” It was watching somebody react to a line you had just written. It was recording something late at night and waking up the next morning wanting to hear it again. It was the excitement of realizing that an idea that had existed only in your head was now coming through the speakers.

There were moments when the music traveled beyond our immediate circle. Someone heard my work and invited me to perform at the Philly Blaze jam around 2002. I remember being incredibly nervous on that stage, but I was there. Later, when I was performing as part of DNA—Deathstrike and Nocturnal—we received an invitation to Canada. Those opportunities showed us that the music could move beyond the rooms where it had been created, even though commercial success was never the force keeping us together.

Today, the group that remains part of my musical life is Dominance Born, featuring Anthwax, CezeOne, Maysun, and me, Strizzy88. I continued writing long after Crosslabelz’s most active years, and in 2025 I returned to record several more joints. The impulse never disappeared. I still write. I can still release. Crosslabelz is still the place I return to when I need the freedom to create without asking what the market wants from me.

That is why this catalog matters.

These recordings document more than songs. They document friendships, experiments, identities, equipment, influences and moments when creativity was enough of a reason to begin. They come from a time when independent music was not a branding position. It meant finding your own music, learning your own equipment, recording your own sessions and building your own way forward.

Crosslabelz was born from the four elements of hip-hop and from the belief that the culture belonged to the people who participated in it. It was never only about standing behind a microphone. It was about the MC, the DJ, the breaker and the graffiti writer. It was about digging, sampling, writing, experimenting and finding something powerful inside whatever resources you had.

Hip-hop remains one of the few forces capable of putting you somewhere else in an instant. A beat drops, a sample enters or somebody delivers a line in exactly the right way, and the body responds before the mind has time to explain it. Music can give you goosebumps. It can return you to a room, a relationship, a summer or a version of yourself that you thought had disappeared. It can make strangers recognize something in one another.

That is the history Crosslabelz exists to preserve.

The music may be older now, but it is not dead. It still carries the people we were, the things we believed and the love that made us press record in the first place. Crosslabelz.com is where that history lives, where the catalog can finally be heard as a complete body of work and where new listeners can discover something that existed outside the machinery of the industry.

We did not make this music because somebody promised us success.

We made it because we loved hip-hop.

We made it because we had something to say.

We made it because creating was the reward.

Crosslabelz Entertainment. Home of Homegrown Hip-Hop Since 2001.