Shortly after entering Ran Rover's sizeable backyard - which is casually fortified with a tall retractable gate and the joint presence of Felix and Missy - two attentive, wired canines hyped as a breed of German shepherd with extra wolf genes quickly gaining loyalty with the hip hop set - one notices a scattering of small rustic objects mixed in with the gravel leading into the rapper's car port and extending on into the grass for yards: bullet shells.

Picking one up between the fingertips to check for a caliber, albeit with a mere fraction of the awe of a Coral Gables mother coming upon a gold tooth in the lawn (this is a rap feature), Ran habitually begins picking a few off the ground and tossing them back. "A nine millie...another nine, this one here's a .45, where are the bigger ones?" The empties are enough to warrant an inquiry about the lack of targets, of which there seemingly are nada, except for a spared, quizzical , old, paint-chipped shrimp boat at the yard's far end, resting with all the metaphorical resonance of the roof-top scene in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai .

"Those are from New Year's Eve," says Raymond Dunn Jr. "We don't use targets, we shoot at the sky, in the dirt. We might throw some bushes in that corner over there and use that, but that's it. This is the 'hood." And just a few feet to the right of these transparent, shredded bushes, just ten minutes ago through an opening in a thinning forest and down a street, kids were returning from school.

The eye-straining blue of the afternoon sky, the perma-summer pleasantry of the Miami sun, and the row of low-cut backyards sectioned off with hurdle-high chain-link fences, not to WAYNE GALE!!!! a detail: this is the ideally hushed and typical everyday, one surprisingly rare in a city sprawled into the dividing status-burdens of South Beach, college campuses, and the occasionally mythical mercantile void of downtown. Indeed, the state of the day seems oddly fair in Carol City, as they no doubt do in lower economic neighborhoods (not projects) on both coasts - the loss, hurt, and fault of life is not hidden but admitted and pushed aside until it arrives again like, well, "a demon," and the sense of relief it breeds is humbling and honest, if like a passing coat of Yoo-hoo in the throat.

In a rap and journalism business long guilty of tapping hungry roots into exploited, animated beanstalks, meeting up today with Bottom Grounds' Ran Rover and his manager, homeboy and label CEO Ray Dunn gives the local rap scene a casual integrity. The newest ground zero for Miami's latest batch of homegrown hip hop, there's not a palm tree or bikini to be seen in the surroundings, or in the label's future marketing plan.

Ranzer Wallace is 24 and bares a sly resemblance to a young DJ Quik and a splayed-braided Death Row-era Snoop Doggy Dogg, complete with two sparkling '73 Caprices dubbed out in Detata Deuce Treys and Lorenzo 23s, but the man's flow, a still-maturing fusillade of shoot-and-duck, bares little debt to the shadows of rap's yesteryear. His youthful, smoove -sailing delivery comes across as deceptively carefree as Carol City itself, avoiding the chest-burst sense of darkness and struggle that eats from the belly of the beast of a rapper like Kurupt. Rhymes ski on with the innocence of a talented J-Kwon, but one who would buck without a sequel to notion. And when Ran spits bi-coastal and adjacent aside Snoop and Juvenile on the tracks "Smoke Wit You" and "Drama in the Club" that spice his debut LP, Ride Wit' Ya Boy, dude doesn't come off the slightest bit regional or wet-ear; he sounds like an eager first-round freshmen draftee, from a school off-the- radar no less. So, for those who live on the opposite side of the McArthur Causeway or merely get locked in rush-hour traffic even, Ran clocks in bars between the touristy sunsets, putting in work and scrapping for big dollars like the rest of Miami, fuck the trinket airbrush peddlers and what they represent.

ignore: You leave the beach life out of your rhymes, which is overly stressed in the various media projections of Miami, especially in hip hop, even though it's one of the poorest cities in the country. Why?

RR: I give it the only way I know it, which is through my eyes, that's why the album's titled Ride. That's not what Miami is about no more, that's just what put us on the map basically. It's not about the booty-bass and the South Beach cruising, it's for the whole South. We just as much of the South as Atlanta and Alabama and everybody else, so it's not just Miami music, we're that Southern music. [alarm goes off outside]

ignore: What are you conveying about Miami to outsiders through your music?

RR: Yeah, it's a beautiful place to come and visit, and it's a beautiful place to live if you can...adjust to our way of life, it's perfect, but it's not as sweet as it looks. You have to be a certain type of person to adjust to the Miami pace of life, it's a certain fast pace of life out here and you got to be able to adjust. You got to grind double out here.

I'm born and raised in Carol City; well, I spent half my lifetime in Liberty City, but this is the only place I'll ever call home, never stayed in another county besides Dade. We grind to get to a better living, whether through music or whatever your hustle might be. Carol City's nowhere near perfect...let me see how I want to put this: Carol City's another place where black people live, as well as Cubans, as well as all other minorities. It's Miami basically. It's mostly Afro-Americans, a few Jamaicans, a few Haitians, a few chicos. I love it though.

Writer Jon Caramanica recently called Cam'ron's "Get 'Em Girls," that early tee-off from his broken-fortune-cookie, Roc-a-couple-fellas LP, Purple Haze, "as avant a slice of black pop as e'er [sic] been seen on BET." But Stan Lee imagery is overpaid and over-exposed. Ran's "Concrete Jungle" rides a decidedly more novice chime of New Wave-stutter into an open cathedral of independent hip hop, but it hits like a bantam-weight champ of an anthem, in a way that's young, meek and direct, with a weight New York hasn't pushed in quite a minute. Admittedly, he's yet to meet a beat that would make up for a tongue-ring, but Ran weathers a mystery bag, a wobbly ladder of production on his debut album almost, almost for fun. One of the tracks, "Play the Game," sounds like hoods have taken over Fritz and Franz Bierhaus, and some idiot's fucking with an accordion, while "She's a Freak" is all License to Ill - sophomorically loopy from a blunt big as a wiffle ball bat, natch.

Chalk them off to ubiquitous skits that aren't there. "Game in Me" and the title track Ziplock a prescient view of life's criminal process, as the latter hits: "When I was a young thug/If you could have seen through these dirty eyes/You'd be surprise at the crazy shit up in my mind/You'd find the motherfucking answer why the good live and the bad die," to a condemnation of rap, "I'm not only making money with this gangsta shit I'm spittin'/Ya'll be twistin' all this rap shit thinking it's real/Try to live like 'Pac just like 'Pac you get killed/[...] Now your face on a shirt with 'Rest in Peace' on the back." To the playbook advice at the end that goes, "See that trap, run that shit/See that hole, fill that bitch/You got soft, crack that shit/He got loot jack that bitch."

ignore: There are a fair amount of allusions to religion and God on the album. This lyric on "Concrete Jungle," you explain that you can try to change the game but it can't be reset. Do you feel like everyone's suffering or do you feel that you and yours have separate tribulations?

RR: I feel everyone suffers up to a point and it's all about what you do about it to get out of the situation that you're in, and I believe that's how everybody should. I went to church every Sunday and my momma taught me how to pray and all that good stuff, and if it's meant to be it's going to happen, so yeah, I have faith in what I'm doing.

ignore: How do you stay resilient in face of everything around you?

RR: Stay resilient...this is me. This is how I was made . This is all I know. I learned a lot from people I've been around, but mostly, it's just me.

During the photo shoot, Ray Dunn walks past his parked black Denali, back from making a run at The Arab on 17 th Street, with two plastic bags: one full of chips and Arizonas, the other with a complementary sixer of Corona in a Heineken carrier. "This is the 'hood," he reverts. By now, Ran's almost caput, taking blunts to the head for a good hour. He lies contentedly on the grass, peering through cheerful slits at the clouds. "Now I see why motherfuckers go to the beach."

Finishing up the interview, Ran puts a close-circling Missy and Felix in a cage, and invites everyone inside. The crib is spacious, cool white tiles, old school big-screen television, and mirrors paper the far right wall above a stretch of plush couches. By this point, there's a sense that unfinished business is calling, in that blazed perspective, and Ray puts his head in his hands for the remainder of the interview, as his cousin and the label's co-founder James Dunn, takes a seat nearby in silence.

ignore: When and how did you start slinging?

RR: My first time ever, I was about...my first bag of weed I sold was probably in seventh or eighth grade, just sold that one bag. But I really started grinding probably around ninth, about 14, that's when I tried not to be a burden on anybody else and get my own. I can't lie and say I was raised in a bummed-out house, so I didn't have to really get out and get it like a lot of people around me, but I learned. But money was always a major issue out here, you definitely gotta stand on your own ten toes. I just tell 'em what I know.

ignore: What crosses your mind when you're driving and you got a chopper in the backseat?

RR: What crosses my mind? [skittering of laughter] "Please don't let the police pull me over." [crew laughs]

ignore: Have you ever been pulled with that type of shit in your car?

RR: Unfortunately...yeah. I had a charge. I had an altercation with some police officers in Broward County, that's why I don't like Broward that much. I was ridin', ridin' with a pistol in the trunk of the car, it was nuthin' but a nine, not no AK or nothing.

Suddenly there's a commotion outside. Ran's mom dukes has arrived. Empty Coronas are picked up, trash is quickly discarded, an AK is stashed in a not-so-unfamiliar, disoriented state. Ran explains that I'm from a magazine, but she doesn't seem all that impressed by this shaggy white guy. She flips on the television, seemingly cooling and we move into a corner room that connects that living room with the dining room, filled with a collection of white leather couches. Wrap it up, click, and on the way out, there's a glimpse of Ran in middle school in band, back when he played the trumpet and drums. After a little resistance, he begins to laugh at the photos and reminisces: from the middle-school band, he went on to play linebacker and running back for Miami Norland Senior High School, dodged college because he "wanted to stay in Miami," and now he's Miami Dade's up-and-coming rap all-star, with no less than three albums dropping in this year and, yes, a movie called Bloodline (think Infernal Affairs minus the middlemen and the budget and two thumbs and inside, yep, the M.I.A. ).

Requisite Shout Outs: First 2 God 4 Everything that he has made possible!! And now that's done... 2 times 4 my number 1 fan my daughter Raniya; 2 times 5 Moms & Pops & the whole Bottom Ground SHYTOWN Soldiers: Ray the Don, Big Game, Big Chad Domingo, Slimm, The Dean, GB, KALENCE, Big Ced, Mika. Much Love 2: Ya Boy Vy, Drum Majorz (Fentz Gorilla TEK), 305hiphop.com, THC, IKV, ProblemChild, Colosus, Paki, LISN, and all the rest of the producers from Ride Wit Ya Boy , DJ Means, DJ Mega Mix, DJ Suicide, Funkmaster Oli, Trick, Pitbull, Picalo, P.M., and Jacki-O and everyone else who keeps my songs spinning.

Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine
Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine
Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine
Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine
Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine
Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine Ran Rover and Bottom Grounds Records by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine