I dunno. Maybe it was just the acoustics …
As an admitted suburban white boy born to liberal parents (admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery), I showed up at McDonough this past Saturday more excited to see openers Blackalicious than the headlining act, the Roots. What, you might be asking yourself, even if you know nothing about rap or hip-hop, is the connection between being a suburban white boy and apprecating the music of a group with a name like Blackalicious? Well, don’t let the name deceive you. But don’t let yourself believe for a second, either, that I’m suggesting that any of the following statements are true: White people can’t produce good rap music; Truly good rap music has to be about violence and thugs; Music that deals with themes specific to the black urban experience in America cannot be appreciated by a white audience; Blackalicious is a white rap group.
The point is coming. And I’m acknowledging myself as a factor in this review only because I believe myself to be typical of white suburbia everywhere, and I believe white suburbia everywhere to be a macrocosm for Georgetown. The show took place at Georgetown. Georgetown students attended. It’s all a rich tapestry.
I am?we are?an afflicted set. The demons of wealth, comfort, and quality classical education have left us thirsting for the visceral, soulful experience that we believe the impoverished and disenfranchised minorities in the inner cities to be enjoying. We want a piece of the culture that we’re told communicates pain, loss, rage, rhythm and redemption. So, in an attempt to pull our mouths from the sterile and numbing teet of the culture of comfort and expose our faces to the harsh conditions of “real” experience, we turn to the underclass.
But God forbid we should actually stumble upon something that challenges the power structure that maintains our status as curious observers. God forbid we should feel our precious security threatened. “Is this a necessary component of the visceral experience? Well, maybe we’d prefer something a little more palatable, a little more watered-down.” Welcome to the tame and plain, sometimes downright comical world of black culture made for effete and self-conscious whites. Enter Big Band and soft jazz. Enter Sinbad and Billy Dee Williams. Enter De La Soul, enter Beastie Boys and yes, enter Blackalicious.
So while the scores of my fleeced and be-New-Balanced clones standing in line outside McDonough drunkenly and excitedly telling their girlfriends about “this alphabet song that Blackalicious does (my friend Chad played it for me; he spins)” wasn’t necessarily a foreshadowing of my disappointment, it might as well have been.
As I said before, it may very well have been the acoustics.
Blackalicious delivered a very disappointing set, and this is even harder to say as one who liked their music a lot. All issues of white lameness aside (for the moment), the sound was terrible. It wasn’t so bad that a good number of chins didn’t hit their respective sternums when the amazing Gift of Gab launched into one of his assualts on the microphone, but it’s sad to think just how many more might have dropped had the stage been better-suited for Blackalicious. But it wasn’t, so they didn’t. You could definitely tell that he was doing something amazing with his mouth, you just couldn’t tell exactly what that was.
And the times when the mice did actually transmit an intelligible collection of words were the times you wished it didn’t: Lateef the Truth Speaker excessively “all y’all”-ing about such garden-variety hip hop themes as unity, oneness and sameness as if they expressed different ideas; Gift of Gab’s rendering of the alphabet as a prelude to the only song the GW frat boys in the audience recognized; the lamest call-and-response, audience participation gimmick since Jamaica, Queens, 1984.
And it was this last point that got me to thinking about my place in the audience. Whoever it was who said that the conservativism of the present is based on the liberal stance of the previous generation should have devoted some time to the study of popular culture. He might have arrived at the same conclusion that I did, standing on the floor of McDonough arena in the middle of a non-swaying, anti-rhythmic, rapidly-sobering crowd as Blackalicious’s West Coast hippie message fell on cynical ears: The voice of lame, commodified pop in the present is the edgy fringe experiment of yesteryear. Blackalicious’ rap is not a forum for protest and is not a song of lament. While aurally pleasing (when miced properly), Blacka-licious’s message of peace and unity is just the type of thing that allows the voice of an underrepresented and unfairly-treated community to be appropriated by the oppressors and enjoyed as a novelty. Teddy Roosevelt, reclining in his Big Game Room under a mounted Masai spear and shield, couldn’t have done it better.
The Roots were everything that Blackalicious wasn’t. Their sound was crisp (the stage may have been set up for live instruments, thus explaining the disparate qualities of sound), their act was tight, and their finger was on the pulse of contemporary urban culture. How do I know? Because outside of the unmistakably pleasurable experience of listening to their music, it completely and utterly isolated me. Before the irresistable sound took hold (it didn’t take long), I was actually revelling in not being able to enjoy the music at all.
Lead rapper Black Thought took the audience through a tour of some of the Roots’ most popular and loved songs, all rendered with enough precision to be easily identified as “that song on the album” while performed with enough panache to be unmistakably live. Rap-anthem “Double Trouble” was especially triumphant when the delayed choruses progressively crescendoed with enough force to compensate for Mos Def’s absence.
Their digression into solos never failed to entertain as any enemy of Phish knows such routines are wont to do. They were particularly amusing when the performers melted into hip-hop renditions of arena-rock hits like “Iron Man.”
The Roots handled their audience much more masterfully than Blackalicious by playing these songs. If they were going to compromise the content of their message, they wouldn’t try to do it covertly. They would do it as enormously and gaudily and obnoxiously as those avatars of popular white culture had done unironically.
I don’t doubt they were having a good time up on the stage doing it. “Wow,” I found myself exclaiming, “this band has everything!”
“Hey,” my friend shouted into my ear, “this band has everything!”
