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A.D., The Voice

I would love to hear Nietzsche over a hip-hop beat.

Rapper A.D., the Voice admires Tupac, but he’s also a fan of a certain German philosopher. “I would love to hear Nietzsche over a hip-hop beat,” A.D. says. “His swagger, the Uberman … that’s hip-hop!”

Nietzsche isn’t your typical hip-hop source material, but then, A.D. isn’t your typical hip-hop artist: Born Antonio Delgado in 1977, he went to Colgate, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and then attended Harvard Law. A.D.’s first album, Painfully Free, goes on sale December 4. The Schenectady, N.Y. native admits that his background doesn’t exactly lend him street cred. “I grew up in a middle class home with two parents,” he says.

At Colgate, A.D. double-majored in philosophy and political science. He was a fan of hip-hop pioneers such as KRS-One and Public Enemy, and when hip-hop band The Roots performed on campus his sophomore year, his roommate dragged him onstage to freestyle. “There was always that side of me that wanted to perform,” A.D. recalls.

He applied to HLS after Oxford, but felt racially marginalized and disenchanted with the “mechanical” nature of his studies there. Turning down offers from three major law firms, A.D. began writing and recording. Even if the law wasn’t his passion, Harvard influenced his music. “I feel so informed about our legal and political systems … in a way that a lot of hip-hop artists do not,” he says. As his song “Dead Presidents Can’t” goes,

Our society cannot be colorblind/When from the very beginning blacks are problematized/Against that which the abstract ‘We the People’ has been defined.

Though Painfully Free has the raw sound of East Coast rap, this song was actually inspired by a critical theory seminar A.D. took with Lani Guinier.

Painfully Free is being released on Statik, a label A.D. co-founded during his second year at HLS. “We don’t expect anything overnight,” A.D. says. “It’s a slow process.”