Although Phashara recently relocated to Santa Clarita, Calif., and bills himself as a resident of Planet B-Boy on his MySpace site, the MC still considers Chicago his real home. For this reason, the 34-year-old is excited by his latest homecoming, a weeklong visit that culminates Tuesday with an album release show for "The Storybook Adventure," the rapper's first solo effort.

Phashara 2007 (photo by: Charity Banks)

"I see myself as a multilayered dude," says the rapper. This album "is a narration of everything I saw growing up in Chicago."

Phashara, born Corry Banks on the West Side in January 1974, was raised in a single-parent household by his mother, a local chef. The youngest of four children, he struggled with both the negative elements that he witnessed in his neighborhood and the absence of his father. "I don't know [what happened to him]. I guess he was a rolling stone," the rapper says with a shrug. So when the other neighborhood kids were getting in trouble with their parents and the police, where could you find Phashara?

"You could always find me writing," says the MC. "I had a boombox that I would take with me on the bus and train so I could listen to beats as I wrote. I was never that into sports. It was really just chicks and music."

The rapper fondly recalls late nights spent huddled over a beat-up radio, adjusting a wire-hanger antenna in an effort to pull tracks by KRS-One, Rakim and Public Enemy off the airwaves. By the time he was 14, he was writing his own rhymes, kicking things off with a verse about gangster Al Capone. "It was all about Chicago even then," Phashara adds with a laugh.

Since then he's branched out considerably, tackling political issues with his crew the Beatmonstas and raging against the negative influences that prey on inner-city youth.

"I can't say I'm the most squeaky-clean dude, but I try to be conscious," says Phashara, who, as the father of a 7-year-old girl, struggles with things like the objectification of women common in hip-hop videos.