"I want my music to make your ears bleed." The rapper known as El-Producto - El-P, for short -- is sitting in his apartment in downtown Brooklyn, talking about the state of popular music and the world. "This is not a time for reflection," he says, pointing in the direction of lower Manhattan. "I don't know about you, but I looked out my window one day and saw two buildings collapse. So when people ask why my shit sounds so crazy, I'm like, 'Why doesn't your shit sound crazy?' "

El-P is a trailblazer in the hip-hop underground. His group Company Flow, together with other adventurous acts such as New York's Mos Def and Talib Kweli, L.A.'s Jurassic 5 and San Francisco's Anticon collective, brought the humor, depth and dissonance of old-school rap back to late-Nineties hip-hop. "I just feel like that energy has been missing," says El-P, the son of a jazz-pianist father and writer mother. "It's like people forgot about it, and all of a sudden didn't want to hear it because it was too much of a challenge."

Fantastic Damage, the rapper's new solo album, on his own Definitive Jux label, rolls over contemporary pop and rap like a bulldozer. El-P and a host of guest MCs, including Aesop Rock and Mr. Lif, spit out apocalyptic sci-fi rhymes behind psychedelic effects that sound like Seventies Miles Davis filtered through the industrial machinery of Meat Beat Manifesto and the chaotic rage of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team. "It's the year 2010," raps Camu Tao on El-P's bleak, futuristic "Accidents Don't Happen," then describes a Blade Runner-type world in which knowledge is death: "Camera's in your food, dude. . . . We bein' monitored. . . . They'll hit you in the brain, make you go totally insane." Says El-P, "I can't help but capture the weirdness and the tension and the clashing of my city and my world."

El-P founded Definitive Jux after becoming disenchanted with Rawkus, the label Company Flow shared with Mos Def and Pharoahe Monch. So far, he's used Def Jux to record friends such as Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox. "I look for people who can make good records," he says, "because I take the art of the full-length album very seriously."

El-P is going into the studio himself this summer to make a new album with Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, producer for Gorillaz and Dr. Octagon. "We have different aesthetics but similar creative ideas," he says. "I'm curious to see how our styles mesh." El-P also worked on tracks for the solo debut from former Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha. "Zack knows what the fuck is going on," says El-P. "That's what I like about him. He's a hip-hop guy." El-P's sound may conjure the political discontent of RATM and Public Enemy, but don't call him a prophet of rage. "I don't subscribe to rage, and I'm not a prophet of anything," he says, lifting his left arm to reveal a tattoo of a bird with the word patience under it. "I'm just trying to express one cat's confusion. And confusion can sound like rage, because it clangs and it crashes and a lot of things happen. But I don't have any answers. I just have some observations of what I don't know. And I've learned that what I don't know is much more powerful and realistic than any answers I might try to give." He smiles, his reddish-blond buzz cut and close-cropped goatee belying a gentle baby face with soothing eyes. "At eighteen, I thought I knew everything," El-P says, "but I'm twenty-seven now, and I feel damn near like a fetus again."