With his shaved head, chipped tooth, oversized T-shirt, and even bigger cargo pants, the Eyedea of the HBO Blaze Battle was a fidgety rapscallion of an MC. One challenger did a little breakdance number during Eyedea’s turn at the mike, hoping both to distract the focused rapper and to curry favor with the crowd. Eyedea’s improvised response: "He wants to be my back-up dancer." Scrawny white kid: 1; presumptuous competition: 0.

Eyedea would go on to win that televised contest, embarrassing a series of MCs in neat fashion, but the Minneapolis rapper’s first album, last year’s First Born (Rhymesayers), was something of a muddy affair. Although Eyedea’s lyrical dexterity was in evidence throughout, nondescript beats matched with humanistic rhymes made for a less then engaging combination. It was hard to wade through the dense thicket to appreciate the well-hidden gems.

But there was method to the mess. Think of First Born as a screw-you to those who would pigeonhole him as a battle-rapper. In late 2000, Eyedea told me, "From the Blaze Battle, they [industry people] figure I’m this hungry MC who battle-raps and freestyles a little and that they can take that little bit of hype and make me into whatever they want. [After the battle] we got calls from a lot of people, but after we send people packages, show them the press kit, they’ve been kinda turned off so far. It’s the music, man. They figure I’m just some hungry MC who’s ready to do whatever they want, but my music ain’t necessarily something they’d expect from hearing the battle."

With his second album, The Many Faces of Oliver Hart or How Eye One the Write Too Think (Rhymesayers), Eyedea continues to defy expectations. On the highbrow battle track "Just a Reminder," he winks at his past fame, playing two backpackers who are discussing how he fell off: "That shit he did on the Blaze Battle was kinda tight." "Yeah." "But his album’s kinda weird." "He ain’t never get a record deal sounding like that!" Stereotype notwithstanding, Eyedea always has a quick retort for the nay-sayers: "How come my weakest freestyle probably beats they best written rap? . . . Go write a song someone besides your friends can feel." Or, more succinctly, on "My Day at the Brain Factory": "You couldn’t write this tight if God was your editor."

Battle-rappers haven’t fared well in commercial hip-hop. Mad Skillz and Supernatural made names for themselves in the early ’90s but were spectacularly unsuccessful at writing actual songs. (Skillz has now dropped the "Mad," and he has an excellent new album, I Ain’t Mad No More, that Rawkus is due to release this fall.) Even Craig G, a Juice Crew legend who attracted additional notoriety after upsetting Supernatural in a 1994 New Music Seminar battle, failed to capitalize on his second wave of respect with a serviceable album.

Instead of staring down the same fate, Eyedea set himself on a different course. First Born was a bold statement, and the title of his new album encapsulates his persistent problem. Again, the 22-year-old is concession-free. Four of the songs top five minutes, and two of those stretch beyond seven. Once again, he favors long-form narrative and esoteric subject matter.

On First Born, "A Murder of Memories" was the highlight, a stark tale of a Vietnam veteran with a slowly unraveling psyche. This time, Eyedea takes on incest (addressed in hip-hop only once before, on De La Soul’s stunning "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa") on "Bottle Dreams," in which a 10-year-old violin prodigy is preyed upon by her father: "Was a different way of lovin’/Daddy needed someone he could trust/He fucked her head up/Saying if mama was alive, she’d be so proud of us."

Eyedea is a skeptic, and we could use more of them. He’s also an abstract thinker. (Chew on this: "The curiosity that killed Schrödinger’s cat was the only thing that kept him alive, matter of fact." Got it?) The album’s opening and closing tracks — "The Many Faces of Oliver Hart" and "How Eye One the Write Too Think" — are Eyedea’s position statements, his musings on the uncertain world in which art and commerce collide: "I’m here to break my own ball and chain . . . a Renaissance man sits nowhere in particular." Here, as everywhere on this album, he’s ducking his head, hoping to escape unscathed, and pleading for something that’s all too rare in hip-hop: "Just shut the fuck up and let me grow."