Disapointing, and very weird show.
I missed Camp Lo (it was sushi time!) , but arrived in the packed place
(there must have been 3,000 to 5,000 people there) in time to see DJ
shadow doing plain old interstitial party DJing (play a record...play
another record...do a little whoogie whoogie every minute or so.).
Soon Latyrix came on to rap on top of his beats. At this point his beats
got a *little* better. In fact, they were very good for a hip hop dj.
Latyrix are very good mc's, but they misread the audience mood
drastically. They would flow with damn good lyrics, sophisticated lyrics
though not such sophisticated rhyme schemes. But then they would almost
inexplicably drop their iq's about a hundred points and jump into the
old "everybody make some noise, ho!" stuff and nobody in the NYc
artsy-fartsy crowd was havin that. So whenever they asked for a call and
response, they got weak action from the audience. This made *them* look
weak. It's like asking somebody if they love you and they say "not
really", then you ask again. You look like an idiot. But they were
expecting an enthusiastic hip hop crowd which really wasn't there. They
are obviously young and don't yet have the kind of stage presence that a
good hip hop artist can command. They are very talented and I expect
we'll hear them again.
Jeru made the same mistake of hoping for an enthusiastic crowd, only he
is a much better stage performer than Latyrix and so he actually got
some action. He berated and insulted the audience into actually pumping
their fists and chanting shit. He said things like "shit, we got better
crowds in canada", which may very well have been true. He made the crowd
at least *simulate* a real hip hop crowd. He even had to stop his songs
to give lessons in simple, standard hip hop call-and-response traditions
because nobody knew what to do when he said "Ho Ho" and held the mike
over the audience.
Now I have a bit of a phobia about audience participation because
whenever somebody with a microphone has hundreds of people pumpin their
fists in the air I can only think of one famous german orator of the
30's and 40's. Jeru had everyone shouting "the bitches" in some stupid
song about how when rappers say bitches they don't mean ALL women but
only some women, which is just his bullshit excuse for wanting to write
a song where he gets to say "the bitches" and not sound like 2 live
crew. Although I sometimes felt dorky for not fully participating in the
mood he was trying to make at the show, when mc's start chanting "the
bitches" I can see clearly the hurdles hip hop still has to cross to
grow up entirely.
By FAR the best thing all night was the DJ who played inbetween
Latyrix/Shadow and Jeru. He was outstanding - does anyone know who he
was? He was fucking great and he got everyone moving better than ANY of
the performers. Old and new school hip hop for about an hour and not ONE
track made west of new jersey!
-Chris Fahey