Tech N9ne bio in brief, real name & music

Also known as Aaron Dontez Yates, Tech N9ne got his name from the TEC-9 semi-automatic handgun – a reference to his fast, choppy rhyming style. His career began in 1991 as a member of the hip-hop group Black Mafia, and after a decade of moderate success in his native Kansas City, he finally broke out in 2001 with Anghellic, which reached number 79 on the Billboard 200. This was also his first album on Strange Music, the rapper's very own label, which he co-founded with businessman Travis O'Guin in 1999. 

Since then, the rapper's career has been one long success story. Each album has climbed higher and higher in the charts – All 6's and 7's, released in 2011, peaked at number 4 on the Billboard 200. What's more, Strange Music is now arguably the most successful independent hip hop label of all time. His songs have appeared in films, video games and on TV. To date, he has released 10 solo albums and 6 collaborative albums.

One of the things Tech N9ne is best known for is his collaborations. He has released songs that feature big-name artists such as Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne and Corey Taylor. Six of his albums, known as "Collabos", exclusively feature collaborations with other artists. The most successful of these albums was Strangeulation, released in2014, which reached number 5 on the Billboard 200, as well as number 1 spots on the Independent, R&B and Rap charts in the USA.

Tech N9ne's style and hard-core performance

Yates has always toed the line between mainstream and underground rap, mixing club hits, like Hood Go Crazy, with more sinister numbers, like Psycho Bitch, on most of his albums. But this has proven a successful formula – go to any of Tech N9ne's concerts and you will likely see a mixture of hard-core fans and more casual listeners.

He's also no stranger to hard graft. The rapper has played over 200 shows every single year for the past six years, and has released, on average, more than one studio album per year since his debut in 1999. His 2012 tour, called the Hostile Takeover Tour, was described in the press as the "longest and most ambitious tour in hip-hop history". It spanned over 100 dates and hit 90 cities across the United States. The tour was so successful it even spawned a documentary, titled Tech N9ne's Hostile Takeover: The Story Behind The Tour, on MTV.

The rapper's live performances are far from shabby, either. Tech N9ne performs with a band that consists not only of other rappers, but also instrumentalists; he has been known to perform with guitarists, drummers and a DJ. He also tends to perform with a variety of masks and face paint, and he and his fellow performers, the "band of psychos", often wearing matching uniforms on stage.