For younger hip-hop fans whose frame of reference isn’t Kool Herc’s block parties or Yo! MTV Raps videos, but My Spaces mixtapes and YouTube videos, the Paid Dues Festival is a rite of passage, an entrée into an underground subculture overflowing with intricate wordplay, stylistic quirkiness, and hyper-originality.

And this year, as in previous years, the Bay Area made a strong showing.

Held in San Bernadino last weekend, the festival’s bill spanned the gamut from East Coast conscious rap legends Blackstar, to pre-crunk Southern outlaw Bun B to alt.rap innovator Sage Francis to conscious/political rap icons dead prez and Immortal Technique to up-and-coming MCs like Dom Kennedy, Skeme, and Eternia.

All told, there were 39 acts, spread over three stages – one of them, “The Grindhouse,” was an octagonal cage of the sort normally associated with mixed martial arts.

Though the festival books artists from all over the United States, a large delegation of 2011’s featured artists either hail from, currently live in, or have strong ties to the Bay Area. As it turned out, the majority of them performed on the “Dues Paid” second stage.

Eric K. Arnold/The Bay Citizen

Sunspot Jonz, at Paid Dues Festival

According to Living Legends crew member Sunspot Jonz, an East Oakland native who co-hosted the “Dues Paid” second stage, the impetus for a large-scale festival dedicated to underground hip-hop had its genesis in “Broke Ass Summer Jam,” a concert series which began in the Bay Area as an independent alternative to corporate-sponsored rap shows in the late ‘90s.

Ironically, Paid Dues has taken that concept to a much higher level, branding itself to the point where it has become attractive to counterculture marketers, both corporate and independent. That this years’ official attendance figure of 11,000 is almost double 2010’s indicates the alternative rap audience is growing at a phenomenal rate.

“There is no more underground hip-hop as far as the concept of what you used to know as underground hip-hop,” Jonz says. “Because now everybody doesn’t have a record deal, everybody’s putting out their own shit, everybody’s independent."

So what is underground hip-hop these days? According to Jonz, “Something that’s not fake and contrived.”

Paid Dues, he adds, “is just a place where you can mix of all the different kinds of styles in the genres and have one festival. Because, in the end, people love good music.”