Solexism Scala SOLEXISM @ SCALA Event: Solexism Venue: Scala, Kings Cross London. When: 28/04/04. Acts: Prince Po, Prince Paul, Dangermouse & Jemini, Sage Francis, Buddy Peace. There were several reasons why stakes were considerably higher for this, the eleventh show on the eleventh consecutive day of the latest Solexism tour. This was a London gig and the London-based, Londoncentric hiphop media were in full effect – as were photo/video journalists from as far as Germany. Competition was also intense for the hiphop £ that week following the Deadbeat Festival. Atmosphere and buck65 had both played the capital earlier that week and Solexism were now competing for Heads’ attention with several high profile shows featuring Biz Markie, The Gza, Lisa Mafia and Roots Manuva. In addition to the pressure provided by heightened media attention and all the competition, Lex also had to live up to their own track record. This night would be markedly different to previous Lex events because this would be the first time that Lex were putting on a predominantly Black, True Skool line up after all their predominantly Caucasian, “avant garde” leftfield hiphop gigs and releases. The show kicked off half-an-hour later than planned due to sound-check delays and concerns over the well-being of one of the star performers. Whilst the organisers worried as to whether Jemini would be fit to stay in the venue (let alone perform), Buddy Peace filled the early-evening warm-up deejay slot. In Peace’s defence, his selection (including tracks by Jeru, The Pharcyde and Roots Manuva) was fine and the presentation of this selection was adequate. However, he never attracted more than a dozen people onto the dance floor and it was unlikely that his appearance on the bill was even part of the reason that people had been queuing round the block for the past hour. With the majority of the audience being males over twenty five years old, it became apparent that Princes Po and Paul were the cash cows of this event and that whereas they’d previously marketed their records and nights at the neophytes and trendies, this Lex tour was targeted squarely at the die-hard hiphop devotees and worshippers of all things old. slightly later than expected, a lone Prince Po took to the stage. He sounded tired but remained eager to excite and entertain his fans to the fullest extent of his abilities. His set kicked off with Organized Konfusion faves like Stress and once he had established who he was and who the audience were, it was out with the old and in with the new post-Organized material. His relaxed gravely tone flexing a variety of flows went down well and what the audience lacked in numbers it more than made up for with vocal veneration. With danger mouse on the sound desk cuing up the backing tracks, Po ordered a few rewinds and stops during songs to try to corral the stray applause and whooping into coherent crowd participation. Too Much and the album’s title track facilitated some co-ordinated crowd chanting thanks to their catchy hooks but for the most part, even if they were impressed, the audience was more interested in hearing what Po had to offer than to offer regimented feedback. Interestingly, Po himself didn’t seem that enthusiastic about his new single and broke off from performing the bleepy Hold Dat to take pictures of the audience. Overall, the set’s mixture of old and new made for a set boasting a wide variety in tones and rhyme styles but nobody had heard most of the set’s material and so this performance felt dangerously premature and surprisingly short. Furthermore, Poetic’s enthusiasm to please the punters came across as too meek for his own good. Po’s congeniality would go down well in front of a crowd of say, one hundred people but when dealing with up to five times that, he was in clear need of somebody less polite to handle the “I can’t hear you!…what!?” hypeman duties. There then followed a five minute interval of nothing…. The night featured at least three full-time deejays so surely somebody could have filled this gap with something? If not an act then at least a Master of ceremonies to say “we’ll be back in five.” Sage Francis bounded around his stage exhibiting more spring in his step than Zebedee on Red Bull, more ardour than Casanova on the pull. This guy radiated so much verve it’d be easy to mistake this for the first and not one of the last in an exhausting string of European shows. The half-human/half basketball boom-bap bard opened his impressive act with a self-deprecating reworking of Buck 65’s The centaur and then chased that with a verse of the feminist Monch-spoof Xaul Zan says. With the ice thoroughly broken by these sarcastic parodies, Sage recited a poem where he revealed how the daily alternation between moon and sun is, contrary to popular perception, a deejay clash where the sunshine is in fact the reflection of moonlight. This subversion of iconic songs and inversion of roles was more apt than it then seemed. Indeed! Episodes of irreverent interpolation and surprise reinvention would form a potent motif throughout his set as Sage proceeded to continually wrong-foot all those who know and pigeon-hole him due to his propensity for brutal soul-searching. Whenever proceedings seemed to be headed in one direction or too far down one avenue, Sage’d change lanes, jump fences and otherwise show the zealous members of his audience who think they’ve got him pegged that they don’t know him as well as they thought. The bulk of his routine was taken up with a selection from Hope and Personal Journals with some new treats in between. Here sage confirmed his superiority as a hiphop showman when delivering live performances that improved on the original recordings. His hearty humour breathed life into the dry whit of tolerance level and provided the audience with a route of appreciation and participation through the grave hostility of tracks like Eviction notice. Keeping his audience on the back foot proved a winning tactic throughout because for the first time at a Sage show, crowd participation was fully galvanised to support and not out do him. Subsequently, when not obediently filling in the blank Sage gave them, the audience relished their participation in the all new Climb Trees dance craze. Whereas Sage’s shock & awe selection was an exercise in crowd domestication, his inter-song banter represented a hearts & minds campaign of crowd placation. His them/us rhetoric deploring his estrangement from his true fans by the crash barrier and press pit that lied between the stage and the crowd was well received - as was his decision to end Spaceman by performing some human beatboxing, sat on the crowd barrier with his back turned to the privileged journos. That said, not all his divisive repartee hit the intended spot. Complaining to punters about Lex never releasing Damage as Hope’s lead single only elicited faint applause because it sounded like somebody biting the hand that feeds them. It wasn’t long however before everybody was back on side, lapping up a series of new tracks riding well known beats. The crowd went wild when Sage let the loop from Mr Mister’s Take These Broken Wings play out to sing the original chorus. Conversely, whilst a more subdued event, the throng loved it when Massive Attack’s Tear Drop received a dose of Sagefication. When his banter meandered into sarcastic musings on how The Birds cynically cannibalised the legacy of a certain folk-rock legend, I feared some self-regarding jokes about how his own work owes much to that of Bob Dylan. However, thankfully, I was wrong. He’d taken the audience up and down, through both dark and light but there persisted one aspect of his canon to which he often returned throughout the set, namely satirical comment. After blasting out a couple verses of Blowing in the wind in the clownish persona of the world’s most powerful man, Sage began what started out as a “Rock the vote” style lecture. I was beginning to wonder if life on the road had disoriented Sage but all became clear when he explained how his English fans were free to help “Dubbaya” by pulling the same trick as Sideshow Bob did in The Simpsons. Given how polemic regarding Bush and “The war on terror” ran through the night like the message in a stick of rock, there was only one track that could top the set and so Sage closed with the still timely Makeshift Patriot. There were plenty calls for an encore but the schedule was too tight. No question, Sage had been a huge success. I got the impression from being in the crowd and over-hearing folk in the bar that Sage had not been who they presumed he was and therefore had been a pleasant shock to the system. I later spoke to somebody involved with the night and I wholeheartedly agreed when he said “It saddens me how so many people can dismiss Sage Francis without actually having heard a single track.” I was then intrigued by the guy’s cunning plan whereby ”I’m tempted to put on a show and advertise it as ‘Jay-Z and 50 Cent’ but once everybody’s in the door to say ‘they couldn’t make it but here’s somebody who could’.” Next up was the Legendary Prince Paul but there was no inkling as to what to expect this father of the skit and master of the eclectic crate to do in the context of a live show. Paul Started off old skool going back and forth with his hypeman. He then gave a quick run down of his resume from party deejay to Stetsasonic through to gravediggaz through to Handsome Boy Modelling school through to Politics of the Industry with further commentary from his hypeman. Playing tiny 5-second excerpts from each record in rapid succession confirmed the depth and breath of his back catalogue but left the crowd none the wiser as to what they were about to view. Proceedings looked like they’d found a groove when he got the audience involved in a gladiatorial quiz show during which he invited verdicts on the merits of certain rap stars (including 50 Cent and B2K) which he would then sum up with dings and buzzes. A clear gender rift emerged when it came to deciding the merit of Missy Elliot but then the mention of one name would soon have every man and woman in the place united through a shared sense of utter contempt. The name “Ja Rule” invoked a fierce wall of boos and interested to find out why, Paul dragged one woman and an Australian bloke called Tim on stage to explain why the gruf midget Tupac wannabe was not on their fave lists. After they gave their apologetic appraisals, Prince Paul declared that it was his mission to turn hate into love and introduced the two to each other. This was a promising opening and I was looking forward to a lot more pantomimic stage antics but they never materialised. What followed was half-an-hour to forty minutes where Paul played some of his favourite songs and party breaks for a verse or two before then flipping the next tune with minimal manipulation. Apart from a bit of scratching early on in the set and regularly turning the fader down to encourage the audience to fill in the blanks during this flitting medley , Paul’s only other noticeable deejaying involved the beat-matching of the instrumental for Jeru’s Come Clean with the acapella of The Pharcyde’s Passin’ me by. After a while, the party began to drag. Beastie Boys’s intergalactic, KRS’s Step into a world and House of Pain’s Jump Around are all fun tracks but I already own them and could have listened to myself changing tracks every 32 bars back at home. This could have been a great warm up set and I would have loved to have gone and had a dance but I did not want to lose my vantage point in case he did something interesting again….he didn’t, Iwas getting thirsty and it was fast approaching last orders at the bar. earlier that afternoon, Jemini had been rushed to hospital suffering debilitating back pain and was now thoroughly dosed up on heavy-duty anti-inflammatories so the headline act very nearly never happened. Even when the show did go ahead it remained a spectacle that needed to be seen to be believed as DM insisted on deejaying wearing those ungainly mittens and what must have been a sweltering mouse costume. Despite having just cause to throw in the towel, neither showed any sign of discomfort as they soldiered on with their robust set and the night’s grandfinale. If DM & Jemini could bottle that energy….well they’d still probably be no better off than they are now.. They had a lot to offer and gave it everything but they lack a distinctive identity and a product is only as successful as its branding. DM & Jemini (and hypeman Fort Knox) did what they do so well but there’s always the nagging suspicion that what they’re doing is a tribute or homage and so no matter how good they are, there’s always the thought that it would be better to see the originals. The group gave their fans a faultless performance and for a while it looked like this was shaping up to be a steady warm-down from Sage’s Set. However, subsequent events would show that the audience had been lulled into a false sense of security. It would be an understatement to say that the place went crazy when, about half way into the night’s final act, Prince Po joined his pals on stage to stick a rocket under the audience. Finally Po was getting the applause he craved and Jemini and Knox had something to bounce off. As if to cement their reputation as this decade’s Black Star, Dangermouse wheeled out yellowman’s Zungguzungguguzungguzeng For the quartet to raise the roof with their answer to Redefinition and that was not the only reworking of an old favourite. Apart from me, there was another birthday boy in the house; namely Lex Records’ head honcho Tom Brown – so of course a round of Happy birthday to you was in order. Overall, the show had all the quality ingredients to make for a night as delicious as a trifle – only all the layers were in the wrong order. looking at the line up on paper it seemed obvious what the running order would be. It would have been better to have started with Prince Paul’s frivolous party rocking set, then the untested, unknown material of Prince Po, then DM & Jemini’s stalwart stylings and finally the inspirational sage Francis but I guess Jemini’s crippling pain meant that his set had to be deferred as long as possible which in turn effected the running order of everybody else. The actual running order meant that the fruit and jelly was sandwiched beneath the dry spunge and above the cream and sprinklings that were crushed to the bottom of the bowl. - Sumo Kaplunk | profile  Related Links: Lex Prince Po interview Jemini interview © CD Goldie/ukhh.com 1999 - 2004