Every hip-hop stereotype is true
December 10th, 2008 at 03:18

A few weeks ago I was joking with my trendy new London friends, Eve and Hel, about wanting to go to a rap battle after watching a few on YouTube. For the uninitiated, a rap battle is when two rappers get up on stage and slag each other off whilst “freestyling”. I never actually expected to end up going to a rap battle, but then that’s what happens when you live in a city which has everything.

So we decided to go to The Jump Off, at The Astoria, which is a monthly festival of hip-hoppery, which pleasingly, is almost exactly how you would imagine it to be, as it turns out that every hip-hop stereotype is true.

What made this all the more interesting is that immediately prior to going here, we attended a Skeptics in the Pub debate on UFOs with psychologist Chris French from Goldsmiths Uni and UFO crackpot Nick Pope. It was very much the antithesis of hip-hop: you’d need a collective noun for Guardian readers to describe the demographics there. This was actually superb – both French and Pope swapped sides and argued using each others arguments, just for the intellectual challenge. The best bit though, was that it provided an interesting contrast.

We weren’t really sure what to expect at the Jump Off, because to be honest, we’re all a bit middle class (Hel especially – she went to grammar school). This is something of a disadvantage in the hip-hop scene because if you don’t have an unpleasant back-story you’re not considered to have much credibility. We did plan to hip-hop up our appearances a bit – the others bought baseball caps and so on, but we didn’t care wear them in the end. We did try to modify our personalities slightly though – for example, Hel had to change her intonation when mentioning her Estate, to being merely ‘the estate’, and I if asked, planned to respond that my degree is from the “University of Life” (it was a BA (dishons) Stabbin’ with Beatboxin’).

We joined the queue for the Astoria and within seconds, a man said to us “Want some weed?”, so we immediately knew this could get interesting. This was only confirmed whem the man on the door asked us what gig we were here for, as we clearly didn’t look like the hip-hop demographic.

Walking through the door frame, I was subject to a rather ominous frisking. Though having your bag searched is quite a regular occurence at London gig venues, usually it’s just a case of the bouncers taking a half-hearted glance at your bag and saying “that’s fine”, though in this case, my arms and legs were thoroughly patted-down and I had to turn out all of my pockets. This certainly exacerbated any anxiety I had about getting murdered.

What struck me on entering the venue was not, thankfully, a knife or some stray bullets, but just how out of place we looked. Not because we were three white people at a gig for a genre with a predominantly black fanbase, but because everyone else looked like they knew about hip-hop and rap and stuff – they all decorated themselves with chains and knives and sportswear. My hip-hop knowledge extends as far as The Beastie Boys and Flobots. Also, I probably have more hair than every other man who was in that room put together.

Interestingly, they were filming it all for YouTube and presumably the telly at some point – so look forward to seeing my face looking slightly bewildered in the background of some promotional material soon!

The bill was an interesting one – it seemed to cover all of the hip-hop bases. We got there a little late, so the first act that we saw was comedian Toju, who was apparently on the dire Balls of Steel, who was described on the poster as being a “militant black guy” – so as you might imagine, his set had some uncomfortable moments for the three people with probably the pastiest skin there, as I’m sure we all collectively prayed “please don’t pick on me”. Thankfully, he wasn’t that sort of comedian, but did enter the stage saying “all the black people in the audience say ‘yeah’” to a humungous cheer, followed by “all of the white people in the audience say ‘yeah’” which led to a few weak grunts from around the room. The rest of his set was jokes and an awful lot of libel about various hip-hop celebrities which I’m sure would be excellent if you understood the references and didn’t just listen to ska.

Afterwards, and in-between acts, a DJ played some tunes (laid down some beats?), in which most of the songs sampled sound effects of gunshots. They songs also sounded more-or-less the same. Unlike ska. Ahem.

Next up was what could best be described as a Whores Fashion Show. Presumably at the behest of one of the corporate sponsors, the apparent finalists for “Miss Hip-Hop” paraded around the stage for a few minutes in what could best be described as clothing designed by the colourblind. In a few cases, it appeared that they’d forgotten to finish getting fully dressed before entering the stage – I assume it was because of time pressure, as the event was running slightly behind the published schedule.

There were also some men on stage (I don’t think there was a corresponding “Mr Hip-Hop” competition), who didn’t seem to know much about fashion either. A lot of the costumes consisted of a hoodie and trousers with the same pattern on. I’m dimly aware that it’s embarassing for women if two women show up for something wearing the same dress, and I experience similar anxiety if I see people wearing the same t-shirt (complete with witty slogan/logo/etc) as me – so I’d assume turning up wearing the same patterned trousers and hoodie are the ultimate embarassment. Not that they seemed too bothered.

The next segment was called “Got Talent”, in which members of the audience demonstrated their hip-hop skill to the audience in a bid to win fifty quid. This was pretty entertaining. There was a mixture of beatboxing, rapping (both with a beat and acapella) and normal singing. Like with any talent contest, the calibre of the talent was varied, and the audience were encouraged to cheer or boo the contestants. Whilst it was harrowing and a little heartbreaking to see people get shot down and their dreams smashed in front of their eyes by a few hundred people booing, this was offset slightly by hearing people in the audience “brap” the rubbish performers. I first learnt this from my mate Dan:”brapping” is when you make a gun shape with your fingers and shout “brap, brap” – it’s gunfire, you see. Way to dispell the stereotypes, hip-hoppers.

My favourite thing about this segment was that most of the contestants were the sort of people I’d cross the road to avoid walking past, and that all of the rappers had given themselves rap names. One contestant, who called himself ‘Stabs’ (no, really), was surprisingly threatening in a Wolf-from-Gladiators sort of way, getting moody when he was knocked out of the competition. As it turned out, most of the raps people did were about how difficult it is living in South London. I’m glad I live north of the river.

In the end the winner though, was a singer who we speculate won only because he was singing in a very heartfelt way about his mother. How much he liked her, I mean, rather than implying that she was a prostitute that he would like to shoot.

After the talent segment, it finally reached the point in the evening we’d all been waiting for – the rap battle. It was a special ‘grudge rematch’ between Micky Negro and Arkaic – who had duelled previously. It was phenomenal.

Obviously, all previously held values we had about racism, sexism and homophobia being bad had to be suspended – not an easy task when you’re there with two fairly militant feminists, but it was an incredible sight to see. Arkaic got served. And it totally made the whole evening worthwhile. The audience were really into it to, reacting to every rhyme with great enthusiasm. The freestyling was genuinely impressive too – the rappers reacted to what was going on around them and to what their opponent was saying. There was, of course, a lot of lazy rhymes calling their opponent “gay” or “whack” but there were also a lot of clever ones too.

I think the battle could have gone either way until Arkaic, a white guy, made the mistake of bringing racial matters to the forum. When he claimed that Micky Negro had a face that looked like it had been “hit by a frying pan” because he was black, he seemed to lose the audience’s sympathy, leading to Micky Negro’s final knock-out line of “This is like Barack Obama versus John McCain”, at which point the audience went wild, leading to a crescendo in which the DJ weighed in with some dramatic scratching, even though he still had time on the clock – it was clear who the winner was going to be.

Content, we left soon after this, not bothering to stay for the final “pillow fight” segment, which surprisingly, was literally just a pillow fight – there wasn’t a hidden hip-hop meaning, such as ‘pillow’ being slang for ‘gun’ or something. It was just people fighting with pillows, which seems a bit tame, really.

It was all pretty incredible really – the sort of thing that we all agreed was well worth going to, but that we should never go to again.

Comments(4)

Gig Round-up
June 14th, 2008 at 15:29

The last week has been pretty spectacular – I’ve been to three gigs, and not just any old gig, but three big name gigs.

Last ever Capdown gig at the Pitz, Milton Keynes

Depressingly, one of my favourite bands, Capdown have split up – though they did one last show in Milton Keynes, their home town. And like the other four times I’ve seen them live, it was amazing. What made things even better – aside from getting free merch from the stall as it was the last gig – was that I somehow managed to position myself right at the front, on the barrier, dead centre, meaning I had the best possible view of the show, and got to experience the full intensity of the set, without worrying about being knocked over in a violent pit. Because I’m a big wimp.

From what I can tell, I think their split is fairly amicable – their official excuse is something about needing stability or something totally unpunk like that. Because of this, I’m pretty sure it was the lead singer who caused the split – whereas the rest of the band still looked suitably punk, he was wearing a shirt with a collar. And, er, apparently he has a kid too.

Amazing gig though. I can’t wait until the reunion tour.

The Sex Pistols at Birmingham Academy

I went with my dad, uncle and cousin to see the Sex Pistols again. Billed as an “intimate warm-up show” for their tour of festivals… it was only as intimate as one can reasonably be with something like four thousand people (mostly, bald old men) in the audience.

To be honest, I didn’t think they were as good this time as they were the first time I saw them in Brixton – I’m not sure if they were technically any worse – and it was definitely a smaller venue, which should have been better, but it became uncomfortably nationalistic and right-leaning at a few points. Like in Brixton, the Pistols came on stage to an old-timey song singing “They’ll always be an England”, and between songs the set was littered with patriotic nonsense, with John Lydon saying at one point “there’s only one thing better than the English abroad… and that’s the English at home”, and at another point seemed to stick it to the Muslims by getting the audience to sing a chorus of “Allah”, like the Muslim call for prayer.

Don’t get me wrong – I love sticking it to the religions, but when this was contextualised as coming from a man who doesn’t strike you as the sort to have intellectually examined religion and politics, and lumped in with the pro-”English” stuff, it just came across as a bit racist. It didn’t help that most of the audience were skinheads… although I guess a lot of them just lost their hair due to age.

Maybe I got the wrong end of the shtick?

Less Than Jake at Camden Barfly

I bloody love Less Than Jake. To the extent that a couple of years ago I got my family to take a short trip to Bournemouth specifically so I could go to their one-off gig there. I nearly went to see them a few months later, but made the mistake of smashing my car up, so I couldn’t get there. So I’d been waiting nearly two years to see them again when they announced that they were playing Reading this year, which I hopefully have tickets for. Horrifyingly though, it looks like they’re going to clash with Rage Against the Machine, so I’m going to miss it. So I was slightly gutted until they announced they were going to play an “intimate show” in Camden as a warm up for their tour.

It turns out that getting up early and pressing F5 a lot to get tickets for last night’s show was totally worth. It really was something you could term an “intimate” gig. The venue was tiny. Maybe about 200 capacity. And I was there to see a band who can play Opera Houses, ice rinks and the main stage at Reading. And once again, I somehow managed to end up standing right at the front, against the barrier, dead in the centre.

I’d bought my friend Katy along as she had heard one LTJ album (Borders & Boundaries) something like five years ago, so I slightly worried she’d moan that I’d taken her to a rubbish gig, but in producing this worry, I forgot to factor in that the gig would be amazing. Which it was.

Here’s some songs I can remember that were on the setlist:

• Does the Lion City still roar?
• Plastic Cup Politics
• Johnny Quest Thinks We’re Sell Outs
• Look What Happened
• Ghosts of Me and You
• Great American Sharpshooter
• History of a Boring Town
• Science of Selling Yourself Short
• Rest of my life
• Al’s War
• Krazy Glue
• Last one out of Liberty City
• Gainsville Rock City
• All my best friends are Metalheads

The only dodgy bit was when one girl behind us (who reminded me of an anthropomorphic Miss Piggy) who had been complaining and fighting throughout the whole gig, was invited up on stage by Chris, the singer and guitarist, where when asked what was wrong, she moaned about the people in the pit. This was, predictably, met with a chorus of booing – the band simply said “Welcome to punk rock”. That told her.

But that bizarre moment aside, it was an incredible gig.

Its been a pretty good week really.

Comments(0)

How to undermine your credibility in two words: David Icke
March 2nd, 2008 at 02:02

I went to another gig yesterday evening, to see Anti-Flag play at Birmingham Academy. Predictably, it was really good. I say “predictably” because I also saw them playing in Peterborough a week ago, so knew what to expect.

For the uninitiated, Anti-Flag are a highly politicised punk band: all of their songs stick it to the man in one way or another, and are effectively protest songs, with the choruses just being chants that you chant along with in agreement. As luck would have it, I agree with most of their politics.

So they have a pretty agreeable message – anti-war, politicians are bad, racism and sexism are bad, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, towards the end of the gig, one of the band had to go and sour the whole gig experience by revealing where the band’s philosophy comes from.

“Have you guys heard of David Icke?”, one of them asked in a bizarre bit of stage banter. The room fell silent, apart from me, who let out a rather loud laugh at the very notion of Icke being mentioned. “He’s a bit weird… but he writes some really good books”, they continued. “No… I didn’t hear that right did I? They can’t be talking about celebrity-crackpot-who-thinks-that-the-royal-family-are-lizards David Icke… can they?”

It wasn’t even a “Haha, he’s a crackpot” angle. They were mentioning him as if he were a credible source of… well, anything. They could have mentioned anyone else and my respect wouldn’t have dropped as much. They could have logically cited, say, Noam Chomsky or John Pilger as a good writer who reflects their political views… or could have gone back further to Kant or Marx… hell, they could have said that their political views are derived from the work of Kerry Katona and their credibility wouldn’t have nosedived so quickly.

Mortified, I tried to put this behind me and enjoy the rest of the gig… although it all felt a little tainted.

At the end of the gig, I saw one of the band milling around and meeting fans, so I decided to confront him. At this point, I was on a post-gig high, so I was rather animated, loud and sweaty, so rather than construct a well thought out academic argument, I ended up approaching Chris Barker, the bassist and, waving my arms in the air, cried “David Icke?! He’s MENTAL“.

Slightly taken aback, Sane replied, to my relief, “Yeah… I don’t know why we mentioned him… he’s pretty crazy!”. My respect for the band rose slightly.

So… I guess it was all okay in the end, and the band aren’t hopefully that mental… although I now get a feeling my admiration of Anti-Flag and their music is going to be a lot more difficult to defend when confronted by critics moaning about my favourite bands. I imagine its a bit like a Mark Speight fan feeling obliged to defend Speight in the face of murder allegations.

Comments(1)

Classic FM
February 25th, 2008 at 19:07

My car’s cassette tape adapter finally broke the other day, meaning that I can no longer rock out listening to my iPod whilst driving along. This means that rather than listen to Reel Big Fish, or, er, The Economist Podcast, I’ve instead had to endure the radio.

As a young, cool trendsetter, I first decided to turn to Radio 1. I tried listening to this on a couple of journeys, but it made me feel old and depressed. The DJs spoke about the most asinine garbage: on Saturday afternoon – I’m not making this up – there was a phone-in discussion about what biscuits the listeners were eating at that point in time. The DJ read out texts from people who were (thrillingly) eating digestives, rich teas, custard cremes and so on, and then upped the ante by inviting a caller to speak live on air about the biscuits she was eating. Spoiler: it was a chocolate digestive.

The music was strange too. I didn’t realise I was so hopelessly out of touch – listening to the last part of the Top 40 yesterday was a bewildering experience, as I didn’t know any of the songs, or even recognise the names of any of the artists. Why had I never heard of the number one artist (“Duffy”) before yesterday? Surely if someone is famous enough to be number one they’d at least be a part of the public conciousness?

So for the past couple of days I’ve been trying a different tactic: I’ve been listening to Classic FM instead. Its significantly better because Chris Moyles isn’t anywhere near it. It clearly takes a populist stance, as despite knowing nothing about classical music, I’ve so far recognised about half the tracks I’ve listened to on there. Driving along to the James Bond theme tune is quite exciting, even if subconsciously it is urging you to drive fast and womanise.

The funniest thing though was listening to the Classic FM Chart Show on Saturday night. It was just like Radio 1 – there was a presenter playing the top selling singles, they even had jingles to introduce each track with the number of its chart position. The crucial difference with radio one though, was that whereas Radio 1’s jingles are something like “Number One… one… one…”, with lots of echo, over production and laid on top of a several sound effects, like most radio jingles are, to sound exciting, Classic FM’s jingle was just a man’s voice saying in the Queen’s English “Number One”. Classy.

Recommend me a radio station, people!

Comments(7)

Sex Pistols
November 11th, 2007 at 13:04

“I am the anti-Christ. I am an anarchist!”

“…Except during the week when I’m actually a supply chain distribution manager for the third largest retailer of industrial printing solutions in the country, obviously.”

That’s right, on Friday Night, I went all the way down to Brixton Academy to see the Sex Pistols live, in one of the few gigs they’ve played since I’ve been alive. I went with my dad – he was the real fan. He didn’t just like them before they were cool – he liked them before he was uncool.

Its weird being at a gig where a majority of the men were bald – and not out of choice.

They were pretty good – I think they played every song they’ve ever done. Which isn’t that many. They also played a cover of… something that escapes me now, but I recognised it. They opened with Pretty Vacant, finished on God Save the Queen (complete with massive logo’d backdrop), before coming back for an encore, playing EMI and Anarchy in the UK. Then, oddly, coming back for a second encore and playing the only song they had left: Bodies.

The slightly disconcerting thing was how they’d completely sold out. Its not so much that they’ve obviously reformed for the money, or that they were playing at a corporate venue operated by a big multinational company, it was just that the t-shirts were on sale for twenty pounds and in the foyer area, there were X-Box 360s set up with Guitar Hero on them.

Their political direction was… interesting… too. They came on stage to the old-timey song “there will always be an England” and the amplifiers had England flags painted on to them. I didn’t think punk was supposed to be nationalistic – but then, I guess I didn’t think it was pro-life until I heard Bodies.

At another point John Lydon gave some insightful political commentary: “Who voted for that cunt Blair?”, he asked. In a crowd of 5000 people, there were a lot of liars, as no one put their hands up or cheered.

It was a surprisingly good gig though – the spectacle of bald middle managers forming a pit behind me, and some even flaunting the smoking ban was quite, er, something, to say the least.

The venue was pretty good too – there was a sloping floor so you got a good view pretty much wherever you stood. Its just a shame its in the middle of quite a rough area of London (we walked past Jean Charles de Menezies old house, and through the tube station he was shot at, excitingly).

Comments(1)

Against Me! / NOFX
November 4th, 2007 at 02:47

I’ve been to two excellent gigs in the last week in the worst city in the world, Birmingham. It has been an experience akin to finding two expensive diamonds nestling deep within a cow pat (below the surface, so you’d have to scrape away some of the pat to get to them, getting shit under your fingernails in the process) – and the cow pat is surrounded by some difficult to navigate motorways.

Gig #1 – Against Me!

On Wednesday night, I saw Against Me! at Birmingham Academy. That previous sentence looks grammatically incorrect to those not in the know, because Against Me!, perhaps rather confusingly, have an exclamation mark in their name. They do a sort of folk/punk thing, and they do it very well indeed. They played lots of songs from their excellent new album, and were generally pretty excellent. According to the internet though, the singer has apparently been charged with battery, for smashing someone against a table, so we made a point of not looking him in the eye, in case he thought we were looking at him funny.

The support bands were a mixed bag too. Steriogram were excellent, and as it later turned out, quite famous in their own right. They do rapcore, and did the song on some sort of iPod advert. At one point during the set, the singer (rapper?) jumped into the audience, and carried on rapping whilst being walked around on the back of an audience member. Excellent.

The other support band though, seemed to insist on trying to make the audience hate them. Future of the Left, broke almost all of the rules of being the support band. Throughout the set they encouraged people to move forward and to dance – despite their songs including lyrics like “Tories, Tories, Thanks for the Tories!” and “Violence Solves Everything!” – not messages that are easy to get behind, to say the least. Worst of all though, at the end of their set, the singer sarcastically said “You’ve been a great audience! You get a C+, and that’s being generous!”, not just breaking rule three, but crushing it into dust.. “Fuck you, then”, is what all of the audience were thinking.

But Against Me! were ace.

Gig #2 – NOFX

Yesterday evening I saw NOFX in the main hall at the Academy. It was literally amazing. NOFX are one of my favourite bands (#2 on my last.fm), so it was incredible to finally see them live. As they began their first song, a pit seemed to form around me, and I involuntarily became a part of it. I lasted three songs in the midst of it, before realising that I was probably going to die of dehydration if I carried on – so forced my way to the bar (harder than you’d think in a sell-out 3000 capacity gig that is very densely packed) to get some water.

Rehydrated, I then faced the tricky task of getting back to somewhere with a decent view. I tried to muscle my way forward, pushing through groups of people by forcing my arms in between to push them apart and clear a space, breaking up many couples and groups of friends in the process. I didn’t want to be stuck at the back with all of the “friends who didn’t really want to go” – if there’s one band that I’d want to be near the front for, its Bad Religion… if there were two, it’d also be NOFX.

So I continued to force my way to the front, occasionally getting stuck behind an impenetrable wall of people. This seemed to annoy one bloke, who was really far too old to be at a gig like this anyway, who said to me “if you’re going in, move forward!” and then shouted “fuck off!” a number of times. “Lovely”, I thought.

As luck would have it, it was about at this point that the band decided to play their notably slower song Eat the Meek. So whilst everyone was swaying and waving their arms side to side in the air, I managed to slip through the pit area relatively unscathed, and managed to find a spot right at the front, slightly to the left (in front of guitarist/trumpeter El Hefe). It was here I remained for the rest of the excellent gig.

Aside from the music, the on-stage banter was hilarious. NOFX are notable for the humour, and there were some excellent comments like, “I love this country – you can’t hate immigrants as that’s not PC, but you hate every other city for no reason whatsoever!”, when they experienced booing after mentioning London. It got perhaps a little near the knuckle, when vocalist/bassist Fat Mike was, for some reason, taking the piss out of the Scottish. “Is there anyone from Scotland here tonight?” – the bloke next to me started waving and shouting – “are you here with the Make a Wish foundation?”, replied Mike, before doing a funny voice.

They did some of their best songs – Bob, Murder the Government, Leaving Jesusland, and so on. One of the best songs was actually a cover of Rancid’s ‘Radio’, which they play slower than Rancid do. They finished with “The Brews”.

The support were pretty good too. TAT played, who I previously saw supporting the Gimmies, and The Loved Ones were both good. The Loved Ones was particularly funny, as for some reason, a large number of people in the audience decided to throw their plastic cups at the singer. He taunted the audience for being a crap shot, so they just threw more. It was genuinely hard to tell whether he was pissed off or was enjoying.

Bloody hell though, NOFX were good.

Next Weekend: Capdown and the Sex Pistols.

Comments(0)