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2004-10-02 - 5:58 p.m.
lean back
A few weeks ago the 92Q End Of Summer Jam, the biggest rap concert of the season, was held on my campus at the Towson Center. The originally scheduled headliner was Twista, who I’m a big fan of. But 4 days before the concert, he was injured in an auto accident while on tour, and for a couple days noone was really sure what was going on. There were rumors that he wouldn’t play, and about Petey Pablo replacing on the bill, but mostly there was just confusion. And then, the day before the show, it was officially announced that Twista had cancelled but that Fat Joe and the Terror Squad had been added to the bill. I was disappointed that Twista wouldn’t be there, but having Fat Joe added some excitement to the event and I was still looking forward to the show. I work for Towson University’s events department, and usually the Towson Center isn’t in our juris diction, but that changed this semester, and this was the first time I set up an event at the TC. I thought that maybe working on the setup for a concert would give me a different perspective or make me appreciate it more, but not really. During the show, I wasn’t thinking at all about how the whole audience was standing on tarps that I helped roll out the night before, or that I helped set up the stage that Fat Joe was standing on, although in a pathetic little way it is kind of cool to think about that. The tarps smelled horrible when we unravelled them, any moisture that gets trapped in them when they’re rolled up causes mold, and lord knows what else was on them. One of the TC crew guys told me about how when Three 6 Mafia played there in march, someone in the audience got stabbed in the face and there was blood everywhere. After an hour or so of DJ’s from 92Q like K-Swift and Big L spinning records for the crowd, the first performer of the night was Bossman, an MC from Baltimore who’s had a couple singles that are big on local radio. Having only ever heard his voice before, I was surprised that he was a chubby dude, he doesn’t really sound like it. He had his crew, N.E.K., onstage with him, and they did his hits “I Did It” and “Oh!”, the Baltimore anthem, and on that one, they kept switching the beat, doing the 2nd verse over the beat from an old Tim Trees song, and doing the 3rd verse over the “Knuck If You Buck” beat. He had one song that sounded kinda southern, and another one that was basically rapping over a Baltimore club beat. Next onstage was Shawnna from DTP, who was pretty much the best performer of the night, in terms of rapping clearly and consistently and working the crowd really well, considering that she doesn’t have hits as big as most of the other poeple on the bill. She did “Posted” and her verses from “Dude” and “P Poppin’”, and her next single, “Weight A Minute”, which was produced by the Trakboyz. “RPM” was the best song on the DTP album and I’m glad it’s on her album and at the end of her video now, when she performed it and hit those super fast bits on the verses the crowd would like ROAR. “Shake Dat Shit” was a little anti-climactic after that. Also, Shawnna delivered the quote of the night: “I love this rap shit, this shit makes my dick hard”. The audience seemed to be very confused as to how to respond to that. Ciara and Nina Sky’s sets were both about 15 minutes each, which was just as well since people pretty much wanted to hear their respective hits and get them offstage. Actually, pretty much every act except the last 2 played for less than 20 minutes. It was a pretty tightly run show, not a lot of downtime between sets and they got 6 acts on and off stage within the space of 3 hours. Those are like the numbers of a punk rock show. I don’t like “Goodies” but Ciara’s Jazze Pha stuff was a little better. Her dancing looks very awkward and silly and not very sexy to me. But at least her hair and outfit weren’t all skanky and cheap looking like in the video. Nina Sky did a weird response record to Mario Winans’s “I Don’t Wanna Know”, but the best part of their set was when they did “Move Ya Body” and their white DJ did the Jabba parts in a very half-assed fake Jamaican accent. Fat Joe got the biggest response of the night. I think a lot of people showed up that weren’t planning on seeing the concert until Joe was added to the bill. I mean, Twista has hits, but he doesn’t have anything that was as huge as “Lean Back” was all summer. Joe started with “Twinz”, which I love, and did all his hits plus some of Pun’s hits that he wasn’t even on. The biggest disappointmetnt of the night was that Remy Ma was a no show. I missed her especially on “Yeah Yeah Yeah”. “Lean Back” got the crowd moving in these huge waves of leaning back, it was kind of ridiculous to see and be a part of. The Rockaway is actually kind of the perfect dance for that kind of show, it was too crowded for any real dancing. Then they did a few more songs and then closed with the Lil Jon remix of “Lean Back”, which also got a huge response from the crowd. It was kinda cool to see someone play their big hit while it was still all over the radio and they’d just played it at the VMA’s less than 2 weeks earlier. There was a guy onstage whose sole purpose for being up there appeared to be to walk around with a towel and wipe the sweat off of Fat Joe and the rest of TS. After the concert when I was cleaning up, I found a towel on the floor and wondered if maybe it was the Fat Joe Sweat Towel, and decided that either way it was in my best interests not to touch it. Jadakiss was on the bill originally, and after Twista was dropped, he was moved up to headliner and closed out the show. He did a pretty thorough run through his whole catalog, guest verses and remixes and Lox classics (for a crowd full of college freshmen who were 11 when “Money, Power, Respect” came out). I liked how he segued from “Time’s Up” into “The Champ Is Here”, and there’s probably no other song I’d rather hear on a huge soundsystem more than “We Gonna Make It” (although it wasn’t as cool as when I saw Kanye at UMBC back in April and he had Miri Ben-Ari do a mini-set of violin over hip hop songs and “We Gonna Make It” sounded amazing). He closed with “Why” and did his verse from the remix a cappella at the end, which was pretty cool. After the show, I went and got some Taco Bell, and then came back to the venue and worked til 3am, breaking everything down. -al
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