Onyx.

Onyx
With Nickel-P and Logic. $12 in advance; $15 day of, 8 p.m., Aug. 12, Toad's Place, 300 York St., New Haven, (203) 624-8623, toadsplace.com

Kirk "Sticky Fingaz" Jones, writer, director, and star of the recently released hip-hop musical A Day in the Life, remembers the first time he marveled at the power of rap.

"We were doing a show with Brand Nubian and it was the first time we had that huge of a concert in New York," says Jones, the most visible one-third of pioneering East Coast rappers Onyx.

The performance was during the platinum-selling run of Bacdafucup, the group's breakthrough album, which featured the hit-single "Slam." The song rose to number five on the hip-hop charts in the summer of 1993 thanks to a wild-eyed, hydraulics-pounding video that took a sledgehammer to the suburbs via heavy rotation on MTV.

"The place was packed," Jones says. "You could feel the electricity and energy in the air."

He told the people (in so many unprintable words) who wanted real fun to come to the front, the rest to go to the back.

"And it was like, I saw the whole crowd move at once," he said. "Girls were getting crushed. Guys were getting crushed. I was just like, did I do that? I didn't know my voice could hold so much power and could do things like that. I was just like, whoa, you gotta be careful what you say or people could get hurt. It's like Spider Man said: 'With great power comes great responsibility.'"

Such a statement might seem ironic coming from the man behind A Day in the Life, a movie taglined "One bullet leads to another" — a movie so violent that 10 drug-related, blood-splattering murders are shown in the one-and-a-half-minute trailer alone.

Jones, who also recently made headlines by accidentally shooting his friend and fellow rapper Luce Cannon in the leg, hopes not.

"Yeah, it's pretty damn violent," he says. "There's a lot of killin', but I hope it doesn't come across as serious ... I think people will watch the movie and get it and understand exactly what each person is saying."

For hip-hop fans, it should be easy: Starring Hollywood heavyweights Omar Epps, Mekhi Phifer, and Michael Rapaport ("he's dope, yo — maybe his name has something to do with it"), the movie is the first feature-length film told entirely in rap.

The drug dealers rap. The cops rap. The old lady who knocks on Sticky's door raps.

"Every last sentence is in rap," says Jones, who, along with Phifer, made his Hollywood debut in the 1995 Spike Lee film Clockers, and who starred in the title role of the short-lived SPIKE TV program Blade: The Series. "It's never been done."

The project, the idea for which he says he "pulled out of the sky" one day, and which was in production for several years, is just the latest in what Jones sees as a proud history of innovation dating back to "Slam."

"[Onyx] introduced something new to the state of hip-hop," Jones says. "We were the first group to ever have people slam dancing in hip-hop music, the first to stage dive, the first to cut our hair bald ... we pride ourselves on being the first to do things."

"We're still touring off 'Slam,' today," he says. "I think that song was crafted to be exactly what it is. We had that song 'Throw Ya Gunz,' and it was an underground smash, but Jam Master Jay, our label head at the time, wanted something a little more commercial, something that could play on all the radio outlets. It took us a week and it just accomplished everything it was supposed to."

He hopes to one day say the same for his new movie.

"Once you go rap, you never go back," says Jones.