A few years back word began to filter through about this group of lads called the All City Chess Club. It's not your usual hip hop tale as the All City Chess Club came in to existence at a time when hip hop was struggling to find itself, it was it that murky period, roughly between 2008 and 2011 when hip hop wasn't quite as rock solid as we now know it to be.

The bling bling era had came and was fading, people wanted more than ginormous white tee's and baggy jeans. Not all hip hop fans were knee deep in stirring the pot, selling the white and investing their drug dealing funds in to their rap careers. As it turns out some hip hop fans wanted a slightly nerdier existence in hip hop.

I'm not sure if that's what I wanted, I just wanted hip hop. Whether it was Dipset or Dem Franchise Boyz telling me that they slang in their white tee and that they bang in their white tee's, I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed Lupe Fiasco and he was coming off of some of his best work in Food & Liquor and The Cool. They were albums that gave hip hop a different angle, another opportunity for hip hoppers to get their fix.

Following the pattern of the world working in a strange way, these offerings from Lupe were supported by a variety of artists who broke the mould of prior years. Whether it was Lupe who paved the way or whether it was thanks to Kanye West, who featured Lupe on 'Touch The Sky', a group of rappers emerged who were in a way the anti-christ. They were birthed thanks to hip hop being at one extreme and came on the scene to offer something different.

The All City Chess Club was given existence. But it was given its peak existence as it never really went to any level above it existing in name and theory. The internet had made the careers of J Cole, Wale, Asher Roth, The Cool Kids, Mickey Factz, Blu, Diggy and Charles Hamilton possible and it's telling that the internet helped develop the idea of a collective of rappers who weren't your stereotypical hip hop offering.

Word spread around the interwebs that this group of rappers could form, producing a bunch of music that would be a bit of a shock to the system. To say that there was some hype would be fair, hard hip hoppers weren't all in but many fans wanted to see what was going to be offered to the hip hop gods. It got to the point where interviews with one of them had to include a "When are we going to hear some music from the All City Chess Club?" question.

Each of the 'members', if you can call them have gone on to different shenanigans with the likes of Charles Hamilton going from being a promising hip hopper to completely falling off thanks to a variety of reasons. It's difficult to simplify the All City Chess Club, but Hamilton's taste for some rock n' roll and pink, kind of explains the mentality of the Club, they, to use modern language all traveled in a similar lane, a unique lane. While they didn't all rock pink, they were all a breath of fresh air.

It's not a case of what could have been because besides Hamilton for example not continuing to raise the bar, the majority of the Club have kicked on to greater heights within hip hop. But even Hamilton is still around, rhyming, making music and just being a creative presence which for me is the essence of this group of fellas.

All these artists came on to the music scene around the same time and as society tends to do, they felt the urge to come together under one umbrella. You can argue how important this was to hip hop, probably not very important at all and while it didn't start a different movement within hip hop, it simply continued the legacy of hip hop offering different niche's within hip hop. Hip hop has long been associated with a certain pocket of society, this gave us a glimpse of a slightly different offering within hip hop and what they could do to expand the genre. Whether it's nerdy or conscious or just a mixture of everything, it was the first signs of the influence the internet would have on hip hop.

But nothing ever came this group of hip hoppers. They released a song that sounds as though everyone emailed their verse in and it was compiled in a garage, but at least we got a taste of something different. As I said earlier, it was probably for the better that nothing serious was cooked up by what was the All City Chess Club, because then we wouldn't have these artists as they currently are and we wouldn't have hip hop in such a healthy position. The current careers of those still highly active all have a common factor of not really giving a fuck. Lupe Fiasco has had an on-going war with his record label, J Cole is so down to earth it's scary, Asher Roth is about as far removed from a stereotypical white rapper as you could get, Blu chills out on the West Coast and Wale, well he's signed to Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group.

But perhaps none of this would have happened if for a brief moment, a group of rappers with a similar mindset, a slightly different mindset decided to combine forces. Who knows, but this is all that remains...