4two7 (pronounced four-two-seven and is a nod to his birthday, April 27) is a rapper from the San Francisco Bay Area.

In late October of 2011, while in the studio finishing his debut album Internal Dialogue, rapper 4two7 suffered a series of seizures that sent him to the emergency room. Three days later he was having major surgery, a craniotomy to remove a stage III tumor that had grown in his brain.

"It was a shock," recalls 4two7. "The album strangely makes even more sense to me. And now I have a new fight on my hands. But I plan on beatin' down the cancer like I beat down tracks! I'll be clear in a year."

Indeed. The San Francisco Bay Area bred creative force is back behind the microphone and his music means that much more to him. His debut album, Internal Dialogue, features Planet Asia, Casual, Fashawn, among others. Production on it is mostly by 4two7's production team Eat Machine, giving the album its very unique sound. Additional tracks were produced by Veterano (Skills, Ras Kass), Grammy Award winning producer Bobby Ozuna (Snoop Dogg, Rapheal Saadiq, D' Angelo), and Bedrock (Goapele, The Jacka, Mistah Fab).

After spending the last decade as a talent manager, helping people such as Mystic, Planet Asia, Jake One and multi-platinum rock group Maroon 5 get major label deals, Grammy nominations and song placements, 4two7's debut offering is high-quality rap music that focuses on top-notch lyricism and moving stories about life.

He continues his conceptual work with "Hero", and "Butta On Ya Muffintop", two subject driven songs that highlight his artistic vision. "I've always written songs as opposed to just raps for rap's sake," he says. "Managing the producers and rappers that I have over the years and having those A&R meetings and seeing some things work and some things fail, I've learned that a great song is the key to the game. A song is a great idea that is played out over three minutes or so. That's something I picked up."

"I have worked with and studied a lot of great talents," says the man who has also been known as Eclipse 427 and DJ Walt Liquor during the last decade-plus. "I've seen all that I wanted to see. Now I'm coming back to what I love, why I got into the music business in the first place, to fill a huge void that I feel is out there."

4two7 reemerges as a rapper with the explosive "Comedy Central", feat. Causual. Over a percussive, drum-driven beat from producer Knock Squared (EAT Machine), 4two7 in the first verse chides females who sell themselves short by using sex to curry favor with men. In the second verse, he blasts rappers who present an inauthentic persona. Casual (Hieroglyphics) finishes the song with a heavy-hitting verse that attacks both targets.

In fact, 4two7 picked up quite a bit of game growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The region is famous for its DIY ethos, something that 4two7 gravitated toward as a rapper, producer, and recording engineer with his own 24-track recording studio in the 1990s. He worked with the Mystik Journeymen, The Dereliks, The Grouch, Planet Asia, Murs, and Zion I, among others, helping shape the Bay Area's independent rap scene on multiple levels, including distributing and promoting Bay Area music to retail outlets worldwide. His evolution as an indie talent manager allowed him to see how working with a label with a string of decision-makers can often dilute the music and slow things down. 4two7 benefits by being totally self-contained, an artist who can rap, produce, DJ, engineer, promote and manage for himself.

4two7 creates more than the disposable music that is frequently pushed today.

"I want to be the counter-balance to what's going on out there," he says. "It's too one-sided right now and there's a lot of perspectives that aren't getting addressed. So I'm just putting that out there for those that want that too." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.