that's an excellent topic to review and I praise your efforts to do some scholar work on this topic. I am a Black Star fan myself.

Artists: Tupac (his very first album and some songs on his later ones. People may sleep on him, but the kind of real suffering, humanity and hard concious isssues he carried on his music, are pretty amazing, do not dissmiss him just because he is in the realm of Gangsta Rap, also check out his family history and the influence the black panther party had on him, assata and Affeni Shakur, etc.....)
common: he has some amazing and positive things to say about our people no matter creed, race or religion.
Some songs from Guru. KRS-ONE, Public Enemy, Les Nubians(even though is Neo-soul).

Check out BLU magazine, which takes socialist stands against the capitalist oppression of the USA.
BOOks: My favorite author, Michael Erick Dyson- "Between God and Gansta Rap" and "Race Rules".

-Tupac- "rebel for what cause". I don't rememeber the author's name. It talks about the social aspects of the X generation (focusing on Tupac) and the 70s baby boomers (focusing on the involvement of her mother with the black panther party). Basically the book studies the impact of the Civil rights movement on social change and how the X generation feels totally disconnected to it due to the econmomic oppression and institunalized racism they have to endure averyday of their lives.

-Saul Williams, all his work.
-Nikki Giovanni, Assata shakur, Sonia Sanchez, and other poets.

-I am forgetting some important ones, I will get back to you later today.

P.S. I know you are trying to focus on Artists who are bringnig possitive content and solutions to the table, however is important to analize Gansta Rap as a tool of going agaisnt the System. Yes in a negative way, but is a social phenomena, with extremely valuable issues we have to raised in our comunity.

peace out,

Afro-Venezuelan