Echo
As a Midwest-based rapper who doesn’t yet have a video, Tech N9ne faces an uphill climb to national recognition. However, he has a high-caliber secret weapon — a stage show that puts most hip-hop performers to shame. Unlike many of his peers, Tech doesn’t employ many time-wasting “Throw your hands in the air” call-and-response chants, and he doesn’t slice and dice his songs into an irritating medley. On Sunday, September 2, he rifled through ten tracks from his just-released Anghellic, nearly all of which offered rousing shout-along hometown-pride choruses that kept the crowd hyped. Starting with “Stamina,” a track on which he takes “rapid-fire flow” literally by spitting rhymes over a machine-gun-fire backdrop, Tech proved that his ability to keep his rhymes tight at breath-defying speed isn’t a studio-born mirage.
It takes more than tongue-twisting delivery to keep an audience interested, so Tech (and his three on-stage companions) devised some dance moves to accompany his songs. “Who You Came to See” opened with a Temptations-style chorus line that was heavy on what Bring It On‘s cheerleading choreographer dubbed “spirit fingers,” then moved on to a one-peg-up, next-peg-down effect that brought to mind Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory‘s Oompa Loompas. When not interacting with his cohorts, Tech’s onstage persona — wagging tongue, intense doubled-over delivery — brought to mind frontmen from hard-rock bands both classic and recent.
Most of Anghellic‘s tunes deal with dark subject matter, but Tech’s stage show is endearingly lighthearted. At one point, he dropped the mic and pounced on it as if he were recovering a fumble. And after “Psycho Bitch” (here rechristened “Psycho Chick,” one of the many family-friendly lyrical revisions Tech arranged for the event) he spotted a seemingly sane teenage girl on the side of the stage, assigned an escort to bring her to him, then asked his fans to applaud her for being “a psycho chick, and proud of it.”
Tech N9ne’s declaration that he was “Who You Came to See” wasn’t an empty boast, judging by the absolute silence greeting the announcement of the acts that followed his set. During a SpiritFest that emphasized national acts from the past, Tech N9ne was as timely (his album hit the stores five days before this showcase) and as locally focused (he closed with “It’s Alive,” an invigorating ode to Kansas City) as an artist could be. During his turn on stage, Tech made SpiritFest’s time-honored slogan “It’s your party, Kansas City” a satisfying reality.
