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...So i'm sitting in my luxury kilburn pad one dark Tuesday evening and my girlfriend says to me 'how come you never take me to any hiphop jams?' Hmmm, what do you say to that? Girls don't like hiphop (I joke of course), you don't like hiphop, etc. etc. No, i think not. I know I'd better do something quick or I ain't gonna get my tings, know what i mean? Noticing an ad for Hip-Hop Phenomenon 99 in some magazine, I see a solution to my problem, Jurassic 5 on the bill to keep the woman happy and Dr Dooom ft. Kool Keith and the Roots to satisfy my hip-hop needs, so even though there's only one UK act on the bill, I go and buy some tickets. Arriving at the venue around 9pm after some herbal relaxation round a mates house in pimlico and a bizarre experience in Wimpy's (best not mentioned here), I was quite looking forward to an evening of quality beats, flows, drink and stuff. Get in through pretty lax security the venue's looking pretty busy. I don't know about you, but I quite like the Brixton Academy as a venue, nice bit of sloping floor business. Wicked! First up was Ozomalti, I wasn't sure what to expect as I hadn't really heard them before. They started off by walking through the crowd with their big drum shit, banging away. They get up to the stage and start playing this track and I think - the sound quality is really bad, they had a couple of MC's but you couldn't hear what they were saying or anything (drowned out by the drums), shit turn to mic UP. Ozomalti's style is definately Latin, I'm not sure I'm feeling it though, some of there tracks sounded like the score from a Holiday program special on Mexico or something. This added to the bad sound means I wasn't too impressed. Looking around I see the place is full of non headz, which I suppose is the effect of having Jurassic 5 on the bill, there were a lot of people there who looked like the only hiphop they had was the Jurassic 5 LP and were on there because time out said it was a cool place to be on a saturday evening. Anyway before I go off on one. Next up I go into the foyer and 57th Dynasty are playing a set, I know are lot of people aren't feeling them, but I like 'em. They seem to work hard (they were at E.Ts thing on the Thursday before), some of the joints are pretty catchy, and the geezer with the gold teeth looks fuckin' hard. They shout a lot, are quite ragga influenced. The LP isn't up to much, but they've got a good live energy. Back in the main roomy hall thing after what seems like about 12 hours, Jurassic 5 come on stage, and again the really bad sound ruins everything. Don't dumb fucking promotors and engineers realise that hip-hop needs a bit of a different approach to shit rock music. Lyrics are an integral part of hip-hop, if you can't hear what mc's are saying then, whut? You can't even enjoy the flow if the mic level is so low the beats drown everything else out. I'm not going to get started on one about J5, theres been a bit of debate for a while about with their styles is good for hip-hop or not, but needless to say their live appearance here was self assured and what you'd expect really, Cut Chemist was good though, good bit of scratching, beat doings and tings. Caught some of DJ Noize and Supernatural in the foyer, cold rockin' it! The act of the night for me, Supernatural's fine delivery and Noize's mad beats and R2D2 samples were fucking great. Imagine that eh?
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