As I write this, there’s a disgusting amount of humidity creeping up. It rained earlier and it’s making an already sticky summer more unbearable. Clothes stick to your back, water doesn’t sate thirst and you just want to fight to get indoors to some kind of controllable temperature right away. You want to be…not here.
Where I want to be, is Friday night at Glasslands Gallery, I want to be basking in some amazing dance music with hints of hip-hop and amazing hip hop with hints of dance as bass, bonhomie, and beer flow through me incrementally replacing blood with alcohol and euphoria and adrenaline. The performers moving the crowd, moving the dispassionate bystanders the hell out of the way because there are far more people in IT than there are the ones too cool for all of this. This dark joy in this dark club.
But it all threatens to get away from me here.
BBU a.k.a. bin Laden Blowin Up a.k.a. Illekt, Epic and Jasson Perez rapping along with Esquire DJing are a group of three (four) who pull in an expansive knowledge of revolutionary and antagonistic music to sample, riff, reconstruct and ignore in equal measures to produce music that is designed to destroy my ankles. The first time I listened to Fear of a Clear Channel Planet, I damn near dropped to my knees and became a believer in a Higher Power.
Three kids in Chicago had found a way to meld many of my musical tastes into one aggressive take on hip hop and Dance culture. Not so arcane as Das Racist, but not so entry level that the unstudied applicant will grasp it all on the first listen. It’s the kind of music that bloggers fall all over themselves to praise because in the songs, there’s the kind of music that those people would like to make if only they had some talent.
We can take “They” and “Bloggers” to mean “Me” if you like, because it’s hard to not find direct tropes within the music that I love. I can go through and pull from my classic house and techno records and show you the Cajmere in “Who da Fuck is You?” show you where they’ve lifted from Nirvana and Refused. Show you where the uses of house music and political thought meld and “Dancing is a Revolutionary Act” takes on meaning once more. Rescued from the archive of rave intellectualism. Dusted off, hastily prettied up like it hadn’t been hidden away for the past however many years.
Fear of a Clear Channel Planet is very, very, very, very, very, very, very good. And it is very free. If you don’t own it already, go and download it.
The opportunity to see BBU on the East Coast is a bit of a rare treat. The last time they were out here, they played The Studio at Webster Hall and I didn’t see them because, frankly, the name. “bin Laden Blowin Up” didn’t immediately lend sympathy to the act. Shades of black metal bands taking their names from atrocities in history and the like. For that appearance there was no Fear mix tape to push me in the right direction, I knew that I couldn’t let the opportunity slip through twice.
Popgun Booking managed to bring BBU, Das Racist, Tayisha Busay and Zebra Baby together for one night was incredible. It was like they read my mind of what I’d love to have play in one night and, brother; it was as amazing as you would hope.
Opening act was Zebra Baby, a three-piece ruinously foul-mouthed hip-hop duo with an ambiguous sexual preference whose clear-headed and open lyrical content is well matched to the duo’s stage presence. Fashion conscious considering leads Milky and Black Accent met working shifts at Urban Outfitters as much time given to image as was given to the music. On stage they bring in a drummer who competes against the beats of the backing tracks to fill the club with a punishing syncopation and stretched polyrhythm.
They had a CD available but I didn’t manage to get a hold of it and I took down Milky’s email address only to get it down wrong. The easy way to label Zebra Baby is dance music in the 90s house style but dark rather than diva, where even the act of love is fraught with potential peril and violence both physical and emotional. Zebra Baby’s sexual dynamic is strong and amazingly forthright without devolving to something within the realm of Lil’ Kim (no “I used to be scared of the clit”). Sex rhymes but not really on any kind of provocateur tip. Very well done all around. I need to get my hands on that CD they did and give that a few spins to solidify any final thoughts on Zebra Baby but the first impression was a great one.
Rather than try again to talk about how much I love Tayisha Busay, I’m tempted to just copy down all the lyrics to “Tonight” with it’s implicit command to “escape the monotony of the so called real world to enter the Narnia of Night Life” and write some personal essay about how that four-minute essay encapsulates what most of my life has been an attempt to accomplish, to try to show you how a stupid shallow dance act can be far more than it at first appears. Or I could tie “Soul Power” and all its references to the many points of reference on Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer album.
Tayisha Busay is stupid in the way that is necessary for the genre. Are they in on it? It’s utterly ridiculous. How can you take a silly string throwing, glitter vomiting, crotch pounding, act with coordinated dance moves seriously? When you peel back the leotards, the fanny packs, the make up, the facial expressions and the caked on layers of intentional artifice you will see that Tayisha Busay is working in the direction of other ostentatious excessively extraneous semi-psychedelic art damaged pop acts like are easy, too easy, to dismiss out of hand.
“WTF You Doing In My Mouth?” is perfect, almost too perfect for the modern age. It’s short and immediate and the video is full of a visual splendor that achieves much with little in resources. So seeing it appear on Gawker and the mimic pop culture aggregators all last week was perfect. It’s unfortunate that the commentors reacted as they always do, but the hope, the HOPE is that they were able to connect with someone who may have the resources to give them funds to expand on their sound.
The new music that Tayisha Busay unveiled Friday is as good as anything on the Shock-Woo! EP and I hope that we are able to get a full album from them within a year or so.
Lionshare has greatly improved, but it’s still not good. Not yet. I get what’s going on and I’m sympathetic to their references but whereas it clicks when another artist does it, Lionshare just grates. The posturing seems forced. It falls flat instead of making my head nod and say “yeah I’m with you.” I feel like this is totally unfair because I’m having difficulty expressing why this fake lifestyle rap is any different than say the let’s be generous and call them “fictional memoirs” of other rappers.
Lionshare just never achieves that authenticity, even mundane topics reach for a swagger and the couplets never do anything new or novel.
BBU had more energy than some punk bands I’ve seen. They tore through every song they had and then some, pulling in lifts from Nirvana (“Polly”) and Refused (“New Noise”) along with Aqua but making the night their own. Their high energy music is designed around the juke, a regional full body style of dancing that one part Pop N Lock one part meth overdose; fast footed frenzy, coordinated combustions, and dropped low hip work. Regional folk dancing at a million miles an hour, tied to tap and soft shoe tradition but so far as to be nigh unrecognizable at first glance because your first glance is full of “how do you get your body to do that?”
All three MCs were in constant motion during tracks moving from the front of the stage to the side depending on whose verse it was, and they tried to give a bit of context and education to the audience, one piece on the revolutionary edge of BBU led to the hilarious flock of white fists in the air. The over-educated children of the bourgeoisie showing revolutionary sympathies on command as though upsetting the system were as easy to do as changing your brand of soap.
The new music has me salivating to for a new release from BBU that will give the Chicagoans more excuses to tour so that I never miss them again. Just absolute wonders to behold.
This crowd was probably the most clued in to Das Racist I’ve ever seen. It’s like these people were living the Shut Up, Dude lifestyle for the past five months. Every word in every bar was shouted at Victor, Himanshu and Dap while the three rapped along, moving in and out of each other’s way serpentine like the exchanges between Victor and Himashu. The antics get a bit codified if you’ve seen Das Racist. “Errrrbody say ‘white people!’ say ‘I feel weird’” and you know that Victor is going to try to pick up the monitor at some point.
The spontaneity of those acts are gone, which is unfortunate because it becomes a bit like Hitchcock’s cameo where you wait for the act rather than paying attention to what’s on stage and what’s on stage. What’s on stage is Himanshu with a pirate mask. What’s on stage is Dap’s ass in some dude’s face for a whole song. What’s on stage is Victor kissing ladies on the hand like a gentleman. What’s on stage is the abuse of the airhorn sound effect. What’s on stage is audience antagonism for the purposes of advancement of the myth of Das Racist.
Das Racist live continues to be entertaining. The personality of the three members on stage does shine through. Victor’s incurable incorrigible problem child off his meds. Himanshu’s loveable hedonism that’s almost always too cool for whatever stage he’s on. Dap’s sweat and blood that holds the whole thing in check. As steady as a metronome leading everyone through the set should Victor or Himanshu lose his way.
The flood of their voices tends to over take one another live but in the excitement and exhilaration of a Das Racist performance, it doesn’t matter, as you too are swept along to wherever they lead you. The music got you in the door, but now it’s up to them, as performers, to take you to the next step, and almost every set I’ve seen them do it, armed with nothing more than microphones, blistering wit and the dashed dreams of those who came before, pushing all three members to success.