Unsigned and Hella Broke: The East Bay’s Dirt

“I’ll never lose that spirit, but I don’t miss being on the street from morning to night,” says Corey “Sunspot Jonz” Johnson.

Johnson is talking about his years of “dirt hustling,” when he sold stapled and Xeroxed copies of his zine Unsigned and Hella Broke and cassette tapes by his rap group Mystik Journeymen on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Anyone who either attended UC Berkeley in the 1990s or frequented heavily trafficked storefronts like Blondie’s Pizza and Leopold’s Music undoubtedly has memories of being approached by a friendly teenager who moonlit as a rapper and tried to sell you a homemade tape. It was very nearly a rite of passage during an era now romanticized for birthing the Bay Area’s underground hip-hop scene.

Sunspot Jonz may have given the Unsigned and Hella Broke er