Archive for Thursday, July 5, 2001  The D in Detroit  Motown’s
most influential underground rapper sounds off on his mainstream
Detroit peers  July 5, 2001   A new-school punk rock festival
like The Warped Tour is one of the last places on earth where
one would expect to find old-school racism, but such is the
insidious nature of intolerance hitting when and where you least
expect it. For underground rap legend Esham, who's touring with
Warped this summer, the bigotry isn't blatant but it's certainly
there.  "The Warped Tour is cool, but you got some bands lookin'
at us like, 'What are you guys doing here?'" he says phoning
from backstage somewhere in California. "There are some cool
bands: H20, Rancid, 311, Pennywise. A lot of 'em even come up to
us and be like, 'No you guys are the REAL punks.'"    This
summer's Warped Tour has a setup similar to other outdoor so-
called alternative festivals, where a rap or hip-hop artist is
added to an all-rock or all-punk bill to spice the show with a
bit of multicultural