mos dan
fact music
Did anyone else who was at the show on Friday find Flav's closing 15-minute political speech a little bit forced? 'Fuck George Bush' seems a little bit negative and backward-looking, considering the very real possibility of the first black president being elected in November...
oh bollocks, i left a tiny bit before the end, which sounds really shameful i know but i HAD TO get to the egg in king's cross and it would have taken about four hours on night buses. bugger. was it really 15 minutes? were the audience into it?
i thought they carried their age, and the age of the material, extremely well. they were flying around the stage, so much energy - really exceeded my expectations, i thought it might be a bit pantomime.
the big question for me is, given that i was surrounded by so many middle aged p.e. fans (i went for a drink with some of them beforehand) who were claiming 'rap's lost its edge, it's all commercial now, it can't change things/minds the way it used to' - well, are they right? it's self-evident to me that hiphop=commerce, or as hank shocklee said, "Black culture has been replaced by hip-hop culture. Black culture is not representing you anymore-hip-hop is."
but i still found these middle-aged guys' it-were-edgier-in-my-day attitude both predictable and short-sighted. particularly since they're all quite powerful music industry types. and particularly because, when i (predictably) said 'well, you know what's edgy? grime is edgy' they all sneered a bit as if to say 'what, seriously?'.