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2004-04-24 - 12:44 p.m.
the Roc is in the building!
For a couple years now, Kanye West has been one of my favorite producers in hip hop, and when he started to establish himself as a rapper, I realized he’s also a really sharp and funny guy, and became a fan of him as an MC as well. I have all his mixtapes and I was anticipating his album through all the delays back when he was an underdog and noone wanted tohear him rhyme. So it’s been really gratifying the last few months to see the College Dropout finally get released and sell much better than I ever really expected it to. So when it was announced that Kanye would be doing a concert here in Baltimore at UMBC, I decided to go, especially after the coaxing of my brother, who saw him live last month out in Wisconsin and raved about it. I kinda would’ve preferred to see the Kanye/Twista show at the 9:30 Club, but tickets to that weren’t available to the public, so I opted for the UMBC show with the Young Gunz and Paula Campbell. I’d only been to UMBC for a show once before, about 6 years ago, when Soul Coughing was playing on a bill with a bunch of hip hop acts. Rakim was supposed to be the headliner, but at the last minute he cancelled and the replacement was Outkast. This was months before Aquemeni dropped, I didn’t know much about them and didn’t stick around for their set. The Kanye show was sponsored by the local rap station, 92Q, but when I actually got inside the basketball auditorium where the show was taking place, the music playing on the PA was that fucking Streets album. I mean seriously, what the fuck? I guess some dweeby student employee in UMBC’s tech department decided to blow a bunch of hip hop fans’ minds with something ‘fresh’ from a few semesters back. At the beginning of the show, a bunch of 92Q’s on-air staff came onstage to start things off, and it was cool to see them all in person since I listen to them on the radio every day, Reggie Reg and Hazmat and Poet and all them. K-Swift was wearing a Winnie The Pooh t-shirt and she was the DJ for Paula Campbell’s set. Paula Campbell is an R&B singer who’s unknown outside Baltimore but has a couple songs that were huge hits on 92Q, so I was looking forward to her set. Paula Campbell came out and did her current hit “Take You Home” first. She had a bunch of dancers with her, 4 male and 4 female. Her set was pretty short, she closed with her other hit, “How Does It Feel?”, and Tim Trees came out and did his verse, and in between the hits she did one other song, with 92Q DJ Neke coming out and spitting a verse on it. There was also a weird stage battle-of-the-sexes thing with her dancers, where they got the females in the audience hyped dancing to “Milkshake”, and the guys got all thugged out to Lil Jon tracks like “Neva Eva”. Paula Campbell wasn’t much of a performer, she only really sang like half the words in every song and let the backing track take care of the rest, and let the dancers keep the stage show exciting. But I like her singles a lot, when her album finally drops I’ll probably pick it up. The Young Gunz are probably my least favorite act on the Roc-A-Fella roster, but some of their songs have grown on me and I found myself kind of excited about seeing them too. Their set definitely confirmed my preference of Young Neef over Young Chris, I like his flow better and he has way more stage presence, really putting energy into connecting with the crowd. They saved the big singles til the end of the set and I don’t have the album so I didn’t know a lot of the songs they did, but they held it down. I was a little disappointed that Rell wasn’t there to sing the hook on “No Better Love”, but oh well. Kanye made the crowd wait a little bit til he hit the stage and people were getting impatient. But then he finally came out, with the “Takeover” instrumental playing, and kicked right into his set with “Get ‘Em High” and “Two Words”. Then he started breaking out hits he produced for other people, spitting a verse over the “Stand Up” beat and doing his own dirty version of “You Don’t Know My Name”. Kanye brought his whole crew with him, GLC and Consequence, plus accompaniment from a guitarist and John Legend playing piano and singing on a lot of the songs. It really added to the usual live hip hop setup of just spinning the records and rapping to them. Miri Ben-Ari, the hip hop violinist who’s all over Kanye’s album, came out to play on “The New Workout Plan”, and the Lil Jon remix (!) that’s coming out soon. Then Kanye spotlighted Miri and let her do her own short set, improvising over hip hop instrumentals. The best was when she did Jadakiss’s “We Gonna Make It” and Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks”. John Legend did a bit of “A House Is Not A Home” solo before they went into “Slow Jamz” which was really cool. Kanye finished up the main set with “Through The Wire” and then left the stage after only a half hour, but when he came back for the encore they did another half hour. All in all he did almost every song on the album (except for “Never Let Me Down” and “Breathe In Breathe Out”), and in the encore he broke out some of my favorites, like “Spaceship”. For the last couple songs, “Family Business” and “Last Call”, the DJ didn’t even play the beat, John Legend just played the melody of the song on the piano and Kanye rapped over that, and at the end of “Last Call” Kanye talked to the crowd and told stories, sorta like he does on the album version, and it was cool. Kanye has a good stage presence, moreso than I would’ve expected from the couple times I’d seen him perform on TV. After the show I checked out the merch table and got to meet Consequence. All in all, I had a great time, I got to throw the diamond up and I knew every word to every song and I was happy that I was surrounded by thousands of other people who love Kanye’s music too. -al
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