IMPROVING WACK RAP SHOWS
do as the teacher does
This is no big revelation but as a whole, hip-hop shows tend to have a reputation for, well, sucking. That's not every show or artist but in general, rap concerts don't always have the best production qualities and over time, it gets to be an irritation. Now, Bay Area hip-hop writer and radio personality Davey D is mad as hell and he won't take it no more. In a screed published through his WWW site, Davey lays into the wackness that can be rap shows:
1-DON’T TELL THE SOUNDMAN TO TURN YOU UP- If you’re not the headlining act you will only be given so much sound… The problem here is a lot of acts don’t show up for sound check and they basically wind up working things out on stage in front of a live audience.
2-ALWAYS LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE-This applies to new groups. Look, let’s be honest, if you new to the scene, do 2 or 3 songs and bounce. Don’t do an entire album worth of material. Don’t do your old demo songs before you got signed. Trust me, no one wants to hear all that. They are waiting for the headliners. Come in do a couple of songs. Do them well and leave the crowd saying ‘Damn they were good I WISH they did more’. Don’t leave the crowd saying ‘Damn I WISH he'd hurry up and get off the stage.’
3-ALWAYS HAVE PLAN A, PLAN B AND PLAN C- Look, we all been to enough shows to know the sound is always messing up or that the turntables are gonna skip or the CD player isn’t working correctly. This has occurred enough times for us to know that a prudent rapper will have back up plans ready to go in case of a malfunction.
4-DON’T BRING 50 PEOPLE ON STAGE UNLESS THEY ARE INVOLVED IN A CHOREOGRAPHED ROUTINE.-This has got to be the biggest complaint folks have about rap shows. You have a guy who is either insecure in his showmanship abilities or he feels like he owes his homeboys a thing or two, so he invites everyone on stage who in turn decide that they wanna be big stars like the act we paid to see. This is extremely wack.
5-LEARN TO WORK THE MIC- It seems simple enough, but apparently for many artists the simple task of holding a microphone correctly alludes them.
BONUS RULE-STOP YELLING ‘EVERYBODY SAY ‘HO’
By the way, Davey does include a short list of acts that don't suck on stage, including, "KRS-One, Naughty by Nature, Outkast, Public Enemy, Kool Moe Dee, The Roots, Hiero and Run DMC." Woe be to those who don't make the cut.
Ironically, looks like the promoters for a Ghostface concert in Chicago needed to heed some of the advice. Normally, we wouldn't bother posting this up – fights at concerts are about as commonplace as weed smoking – but Pitchfork's reporting on this story is so in-depth (since they happened to have one of their writers in the crowd), it was worth noting. The short story is this: a show last Friday in north Chicago got out of hand after fans had been waiting five hours for the headliner, Ghostface from the Wu-Tang Clan, to show up. Five hours may not be that bad if you're at an arena show and there are five opening acts but for a rap concert in a sport's bar, you're pretty much taxing the audience unnecessarily, especially after two opening acts. According to Pitchfork's Chris Kaskie, the impatient crowd began chanting, "Ghostface or bust." Someone stepped to stage ... and it wasn't Ghostface. Uh oh.
Instead, Tru Life, a recent Roc-A-Fella signee took the stage, the crowd started booing, Tru Life started to insult the crowd and Chicago (was this dude crazy?) and that's when all hell broke out. Tru Life and his boys began to throw full water bottles into the crowd, hitting some in the head so the crowd began to do the same back at Tru ... only this time, with beer bottles. This escalated into what can only be described as full-blown, glass-shattering (literally) chaos and according to Kaskie, "There was no help whatsoever [from security]. We were sitting ducks at the mercy of the people above."
Finally, the police had to be called in and threw everyone out ... which makes sense, though we're confused because Pitchfork also reports that "Ghostface did eventually perform later that night," but we'd like to know: where? To an empty bar?
Looks like we need an extra rule to add onto Davey's:
- SIX: ARTISTS SHOULD NOT HIT AUDIENCE MEMBERS IN HEAD WITH WATER BOTTLES AND CROWDS SHOULD AVOID THROWING BEER BOTTLES AT ANYONE.
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