Ghostface played the Regent in downtown LA.
Last time we had been there was to see the RESIDENTS, when we were all sat down in front of the stage, and the show started promptly at 7:30 with a documentary film.
Hip hop shows "beez being" very odd.
The support acts "beez being" so very awfully bad.
They make you long for the indie chancers we are used to.
The first applicant was just blurping synth noodle-doodles on a laptop while his sister and her friend made semi-obscene interpretive dance moves in perfect discord. I thought, "Is this Lars's lost solo tape from 1989? Smuggled out past the lawyers' noses? Is Colin Bishop about to come out with his silly silvery keytar?"
Now on came a homeless man who has an album out. He was trying to do stand-up comedy that would morph, not seamlessly (what is the opposite of seamlessly –– seamfully?), into rapping. He was livid about something and cracking misogynistic jokes. He wanted to get the crowd on side by whipping them into an anti-woman fury. "Fucking hell," I said. "It's the black Tom Muir." He looked like MC Hammer in a thrift store suit. The black Tom Muir, exactly. This must be the suit he does his court-appointed job interviews in.
Followed an actual real-life midget who had at least a lot of great guts tenacity integrity and positive energy. He said "Yo, we still fans." He was not inflated despite his great fame. I forget his name. Still I appreciated his humility. In his head he was a star. In real life he was a little person from the mean streets of Portland, Oregon.
I forget his name, even after he rambled on at length about the nice cleverness of his chosen moniker, and how the fratres ignorantes routinely mispronounced his rap name and the pun embedded in it. How hard it is, to be misunderstood. He then announced a new track that was available online, and on cue the weird and horrible "Bobby Bucher" lolloped onstage and bellowed "GOOGLE IT!" Is this the new way of it with music? Live links to websites? Fucking hell and they say music is dead.
Then, when we thought Ghostface was finally coming on, three hours into the ordeal, on came a pair of Wu Tang Z-list weed carriers to hector us and holler. They tried to make so much of the fact that they were from Brooklyn! This, to me, who I was born in Brooklyn.
This was their first time out of the state. They had two ugly Greenpoint skanks just standing to the side, chewing gum & texting on stage. Then there was this animated woman of colour in a mustard yellow coat strutting about taking photos on her phone bunching up her lips and throwing her chin out. She crossed the stage sort of duckwalking. She was extremely annoying. The deejay was this dumb lunk looked like the Hulk with dreads. We the crowd grew sick of their amateurish patter and booed them. Beautiful sound. First one of the night. I believe I even ventured "FUCK OFF!" Someone threw a plastic cup of beer over the girl in yellow which made everybody smile for the first time in three hours and for all their strutting and posturing at this they all retreated.
Only then and finally then came the excellent Ghostface, this evening accompanied by Cappadonna and Killah Priest. They were good enough that he made the hard bad suffering the PTSD that had come before tolerable.
Ghost & Cappadonna.
They did a sort of greatest hits package, which seemed to me to be almost like dozens of James Last or Mitch Miller micro-fragments of longer tracks. They would do Wu Tang tracks, but generally only the portions of those tracks they rapped on. At one point, they did "Proteck Ya Neck" (what, no "Gravel Pit"?) from the first album, and invited audience members to come up and rap the Method Man and ODB sections. "But yo only if you know the lines."
I cowered. I shrank. I staggered away from the stage. I put up my hands and resisted the invitation vociferously. I was physically sick.
If pressed I could probably rap "Reunited" from Wu Tang Forever.
Reunited, double elpee
We're all excited
Actually no I could not *.
I could probably manage MCA's part from "No Sleep Til Brooklyn".
I could certainly sing a medley of sea chanteys in the arrangements by Paul Clayton or Richard Dyer-Bennet but that might have been odd at a hip-hop show.
I knew my limitations and going up on stage with Ghostface, Killah Priest and Cappadonna and singing the ODB portion of "Proteck Ya Neck" is well outside either my "bailiwick" my "wheelhouse" or my "pay grade". The champion that did lurch up to sing ODB's part was a white guy who pulled off his shirt and swaggered around and then lamely googled the lyrics on his smartphone –– we all saw him do it –– and still fucked it up and got roundly booed for it.
Your correspondent. "Please don't make me rap."
Other than that, Ghostface spent a lot of time hectoring the lighting engineer from the stage. He'd stop in the middle of a track and demand they change the colours. "All red," he'd say, now "all green," then a blue period. At one point the house lights were turned up. and we all saw each other in our grisly reality. Suffice it to remark that the shitty fucking camera on my iPod couldn't cope and so all my photos are awful (see illustrations).
It were a reet odd crowd. Downtown LA is full of homeless varmints anyway. There seemed to be Skid Row veterans, junkies, gangbangers and fratboy wiggers in the audience, all engaging enthusiastically in that odd ritual, the mosh pit.
Weeks later, at Darya in Costa Mesa having lunch with my mother-in-law, I told her, "We went to a hip-hop show."
"Did you hip-hop?" she asked.
"No. I edged away from the moshpit."
This categorizes my gig-going experience for the last twenty-five years. "See you in the pit!"? Hardly. More like, "See you at the very fringes of the pit, staring nervously at the whirling mass of fists and hair, rather than at the stage."
We got home by 2:00 AM. Cappadonna was not our lift.
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* I fully believe that Wu Tang Forever is their best LP, superior to Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
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