Fashawn (4 p.m.)

Fashawn is the chosen one among veterans of the West Coast underground looking for the next to anoint, and you could do far worse than the Fresno, Calif.-based rapper. He rhymes with the precision of a chemist, which is fitting for the man who recently collaborated with the venerable Alchemist. Blessed with a natural and fluid style, Fashawn came off like a blend of a young Ras Kass and his mentor, fellow Fresno native Planet Asia. Fashawn is intensely serious onstage, and this demeanor matched lyrics cataloging his Dickensian childhood, born to a drug-addicted mother and an incarcerated father. Or, as he stated, “I’m just trying to survive in these days and time… I’m from where brothers die, every day in CA.” He rapped like a soldier fortified on higher ground, picking off rivals trying to scale the walls — less risky than other forms of combat, but ruthlessly effective.

Pill (4:25 p.m.)

Pill recently signed to Asylum records off the strength of two stellar mix tapes and the poignant video for “Trap Going Ham,” which provided an unflinching window into Atlanta’s impoverished Pink City district. In his furious 25-minute set, Pill, who was introduced by Memphis, Tenn.,  rap legends 8Ball & MJG, validated the deluge of attention he’s received in the last year. He’s a coiled frenetic whirl of flying dreadlocks and searing intensity; no rapper in recent memory has more fury. Each bar is delivered with the force of someone who remembers every time they’ve been wronged, and with the sublimated pain of one who has turned to rage rather than wallowing. When he delivered “Trap Going Ham,” the backpacks and ball cap-heavy crowd went nuts as though he were the new Onyx. But rather than throw their guns in the air, everyone just lowered their heads and balled up their fists.

Freddie Gibbs (5 p.m.)

It all started one year ago at the Nah Right/Smoking Section party. One of Gibb’s managers met a Smoking Section writer and told him the story of the Gary, Ind.-raised Gibbs, a tale that involves incarceration, addiction and an infinite amount of twists and turns during the journey from the block to the bigs. The Smoking Section became the first to champion Gibbs’ raw reality rap, starting a maelstrom of attention that culminated with him appearing in the pages of the New Yorker as “rap’s one to watch,” and on the XXL Freshmen list as “The Most Slept-On.”

But describing Gibbs as slept-on no longer suffices, as the now L.A.-based MC displayed how far he’s come in the last year. Where his live shows even a few months ago were tentative and chaotic, Gibbs has become a ferocious performer, learning to put the full brunt of his blunt-burned baritone into his delivery. It’s the rap equivalent of a pitcher learning to use his legs and gaining significant mileage on his fastball. And like a pitcher wild enough to instill fear but with enough control to never falter, Gibbs alternated between perfect cadence and pacing, and breaks to ask the audience for blunts. He was wearing a shirt with a picture of a microphone that read: “rap is the only element of hip-hop.” Which is the sort of thing you can get away with only if you’re as good at rapping as Freddie Gibbs.

J. Cole (6:40 p.m.)

A Jay-Z protégé signed to Roc Nation, J. Cole has been generating steady heat within the blogosphere and even prompted Drake to call him this generation’s Nas. Needless to say, the rookie has a long way to go before the comparisons don’t seem like hyperbolic gibberish. Onstage, the clean-cut and boyishly charming rapper offered a likable enough temperament and impressive rhyme ability, but the whole often seemed less than the individual parts. Prone to ungainly and nebulous metaphors about “light,” “clouds,” “sunshine” and “dreams” that sound straight out of a bad freshman year poetry seminar, Cole epitomized the gap between potential and actual greatness. Sorting a letterman’s jacket, he played the part of the slick college freshman all too well — until you looked closely and realized his jacket didn’t have any letters.

Freeway & Jake One (7 p.m.)

Following J. Cole, Jay-Z’s old protégé Freeway outshone  his much-touted successor with a blazing, impassioned performance of old tracks such as “1-900 Hustler” and new material from “The Stimulus Package,” his excellent collaboration with Jake One. Rap has always been about intangibles, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Freeway is so exceptional. His lyrics rarely rise above boiler-plate hustler tropes, and his voice is an unorthodox, winded wheeze; but the Philadelphia rapper remains one of the genre’s best. Onstage, the Amish-bearded MC burned with the swagger of a once and future king, wrist glowing, eyes round and hard as marbles, totally focused on transmitting every ounce of every into his raps.

His performance provided a fitting capstone for an impressive showcase that again proved that hip-hop was never dead, just dormant.

— Jeff Weiss