MIA and the Coolkids

Went and saw MIA at the Mezzanine last night. She was great, more on that in a sec.

The act that opened for her warrants some attention, for their craptacular performance. They were called "the Coolkids", and very reminescent of the early 90s 2 live cru/ public enemy ripoff artists/ posers. The fools were dressed in hipster gear (black guys), tight blue jeans that sagged a little with a bandana in the back pocket. They had beats that were okay, but without any of the jazziness of the current underground hip hop or the radio's hard-hitting crunknastay hyphi stuff that makes one uncontrollably pop-and-lock.

And they commited the cardinal sin of hip hop (IMHO)- no hooks. Goddammit. Separate your muthafuckin tracks. I don't want to hear one dude flow with the other guy shouting every fifth word for a half hour. Have a chorus so I can dance a lil and not just bend my knees.

I heard Mos Def just flowing in the studio on KMEL the other day- he inherently adds a chorus or hook to his random flows, to bring it all back together and to make it an actual song. When he was on Chappelle's Show and doing that one flow in the car, he was just going off, but it made it much more enjoyable to hear the same chorus-
Don't push me
'Cuz I'm close to the
streets,to the beach, the bitches, the niggaz, the women, the children, the workers, the killers, the addicts, the dealers, the quiet, the livest, the realest- And that's close
Don't push me
cuz I'm close to the
edge, back, middle, and front strong back shit liftin' it up from the big and the small I'm like J. Brown gettin' involved

Ah, Mos Def. You so def.

And MIA was the shaznatoBAM. She was up there coochie poppin with two nubian princesses for like an hour and a half. Her stage presence was just incredible. She was radiating an aura of fun, and it made you want to have fun, too.

One of the chicks up there was this 16 year old rapmistress who could kinda hold it down. There were all these weird effects on her mic, sometimes kicking it up an octave and sometimes putting two chorus voices on either side of hers- one an octave up and one two octaves up (I think, it sounded like Starchild from Pfunk). Anyway, she could flow and dance hella good.

The other major aspect of the performance was the militance. She opens with a video of a subtitled asian dude that looks kind of like a terrorist and kind of like a military dictator. He goes off about fuck the majority, the minority should rule, let's overthrow the government. All sounded kind of dumb, but the crowd cheered excessively. Her DJ had several gunshot sample buttons that he mashed on all night, and a lot of her songs have gunshots in them. Not violent, just militant.

Jolly good fun.