Beating the Lap
When I got to the Record Bar last night about a quarter to 10, Rex Hobart had just finished, and most of the sizable, mostly seated crowd didn’t look ready for a conscious hip-hop throwdown. Jay Zastoupil, booker for P. Ott’s Sunday nights, Last of the V8s guitarist and El Torreon associate (that’s my best guess at what his non-existent title would be), immediately materialized and gave me hell for repeatedly dissing El T’s bathrooms. He threatened to give me a swirlie. I knew that would lead to making out, so I said OK, but he was only kidding. He’s a crazy guy, that Zastoupil. He suggested our next Best Of issue (you no doubt already have this year’s issue, out today, draped over your toilet tank — specifically, the one upstairs that I took a crap in when you had me and Dante Hall over for dinner last week — as you read this) be devoted entirely to him.
“Best Chiefs Player” — Jay Zastoupil!
“Best Place to Meet Intelligent Women” — Jay Zastoupil!
“Best Gay Bar” — Jay Zastoupil!
That kind of thing. I’d go for it. It’d save us a lot of work.
But anyway, most of the people in the bar were white and not very hip-hop looking. (There was even a table of mentally handicapped women enjoying some dinner — they would later end up in the photo booth, close to midnight, getting girly and snapping pics, which was one of the neatest things I’ve ever seen. I should have asked them if they wanted to be my weeknight entourage.) The show had to go on, though, and a rolling out of beats signaled the beginning of the set by Deep Thinkers. They were the only local group on the bill, which I figured accounted for the absence of many KC scene regulars. Brother of Moses paced the stage, his dreads wadded up in a giant brown hat that looked like a mail bag (“letter for you, bitch!”), while Leonard D. Story, aka Lenny D, aka Edward Furlong (not really) made the music part happen. A crowd gathered, and a B-boy uprocked by the pool table, which may or may not have made the guys playing pool uncomfortable.
Next, the Galapagos 4 crew took the stage, and the quality of beats immediately dropped — or rather the sound quality of the beats. I’m not sure if it they were being intentionally lo-fi, but the Thinkers sounded better. However, the G4s made up for it with some pretty soulful rhyme slingin’, capitalizing on some of the members’ southside Chicago heritage. It’s not necessarily posing to live vicariously through a streetwise MC. That said, I do not encourage anyone as white and male as I am to flap his arms over his head at a hip-hop show. You either look like a dork, or look like you’re trying to make fun, like when you accidentally slip into a bad Chinese accent at Bo Ling’s and the server hears you.
An MC named Qwel was the centerpiece of the Galapagos 4 group, and he knew how to rap, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that he looks like Mike Walker (far left) from the soon-to-be-undone Doris Henson. Qwel had no trouble getting the crowd down front into his palm, but lots of people hung back at the bar. We needed more local cats hyping the crowd. Sku, Approach, Miles Bonny, Edwin Morales, Negro Sco and one or two others were there, but that was about it.
Busdriver is full of ideas.
It was a shame, then, that only a few Kansas Citians got to see what was, for me, the most musically mindblowing hip-hop performance ever. It was brought by an LA-based MC named Busdriver and his backup-band-in-a-DJ, Caural. Busdriver wore hot pants, his fat wallet prominently and probably unintentionally displayed in his back pocket, and a small Run DMC t-shirt — read: he was dressed like a hipster, not a gangster, but, boy, could he spit. His style was akin to machine-gun dancehall-reggae-style toasting — but not full on, just a hint of jerk sauce in the stew — broken by pauses for call-and-response, repeated declarations and absolutely stunning caterwauls into a secondary, effects-laden microphone. You couldn’t understand his words, but the guy was a living, sweating instrument, a human amplifier with no head room left on the gain. The slight, white Caural, who gingerly worked on a glass of red wine throughout the performance, kicked a vicious array of sounds out of a laptop and various gadgets — I didn’t see a turntable on his table, but he played a lot of his iron-clad beats and basslines with his fingers on a drum machine. Cartoon, the Bar’s off-duty doorman, described Caural as “Pete Rock meets Aphex Twin,” and he was pretty much right. The DJ’s mix of bangin’, trippin’ and some whole other prog shit, combined with Busdriver’s solar flare flow keep me up the whole time. I was not bored for one second. And I wasn’t alone. There were many wide eyes in the crowd.
The night’s unlucky headliner (though no doubt some people were ready for some more laid-back shit) was Pigeon John, all charm and cool. His name alone indicates that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and his performance revealed him to be self-deprecating but also musically alert, hence the presence of a live drummer onstage along with a DJ. At the same time, I wasn’t at all interested in “throw your hands in the ayerr” and “make some noise” bullshit — I had just been fire-kissed by the gods of truly innovative music, and no matter how fun and groovy Pigeon John was, I just couldn’t relate. I couldn’t bring myself to care about all the girls who dissed him in middle school, for example, to whom one of his songs was vengefully dedicated. Just so damn conventional, you know? Funky, but conventional. That has value at certain times, but once you’ve seen the other side, it takes some kind of carefree trip to get back, and I ain’t had it yet. Gimme a beer.
Before I left, I learned that someone had broken all the glass out of the Record Bar’s front door. I hope it wasn’t my entourage’s fault, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
