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Artist: Zion I Album: True and Livin' by Justin Smith Zion I is definitely not what you would expect from a hip-hop group out of the bay area Oakland right now. With the Hyphy movement blowing up, the last thing you would expect would be a concious group singing love songs to hip-hop and rhyming about world issues; but that's exactly what you get out of Zion I. With their fourth release in five years, True and Livin� takes its listener on a musical roller coaster through the minds of MC Zion and DJ Amp Live. The album has appearances from Talib Kweli, Aesop Rock, and Fred Hampton Jr., but is not carried by these appearances. DJ Amp Live�s musical combination of Jazz, Blues, D&B, and Hip-Hop is enough to keep a listener interested through the duration of the album but is faded to the background by the infectious rhymes of MC Zion. Released by Live Up records (which Dead Prez is signed to), this album seems to pull no punches, with tracks like "Poems for Post-Modern Decay" that seem to envoke a poetic revolution within the track. Zion I seems to be making a point with this album; hip-hop is in fact True and Livin�.