So this one is going to have relatively little to do with Prague as a city, but I saw a concert earlier this week that was so unique and unexpected that it deserves a post. Bear with me, my inner audiophile will come out strong here.
A rough and only moderately informed history: A lot of people don’t realize that hip hop started more with DJs than it did with rappers. In the 1970s, DJs at New York City block parties started performing with two turntables at once, using two copies of a record to continuously repeat a “breakbeat” for dancing, or the music in between the vocals (this would usher in the use of sampling in modern hip hop). At the same time, they’d throw out improvised lyrics to the rhythm in a style that emulated Jamaican toasting. This acted more or less in the same way that a caller operates during square dance performances, but the practice eventually evolved into rapping. One of these original DJs was Kevin Donovan, aka Afrika Bambaataa.
DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s show this Tuesday at The Roxy in Prague was a tribute to Afrika Bambaataa, a man they claim influenced them to the point that they “never would have been DJs without him.” It was one of the most informed, loving and unique tributes of all time; not only did they entirely play the music Bambaataa played in his DJing years, mixing standard breakbeat production with Bambaataa’s original releases, but thanks to a loan from Cornell University’s library, they performed using the exact same vinyl records that Bambaataa once owned. At one point, Cut Chemist paused the music to announce the record playing at the moment was the only pressing in existence.
DJ Shadow, creator of the seminal album Endtroducing….. and a longtime personal favorite, looks like the standard attendee at a Limp Bizkit concert. Cut Chemist, one of the founding members of Jurassic 5, looks like the standard attendee at a Star Trek convention. When they took the stage at the Roxy, neither looked like the unbelievably talented and overwhelmingly cool DJs they are.
The pair’s setup included a total of 6 turntables, several drum machines that haven’t even been produced since the 70s, and two huge crates of Bambaataa’s records. What it didn’t include was a Macbook or a sampling board – this set was all analog. “We’ve never played Prague together,” DJ Shadow announced after explaining the show’s premise, “and we haven’t played an all-vinyl set in a long time, so combine that with Afrika Bambaataa’s music and we could witness some history here tonight.”
And boy, did they deliver on that front. This was the second concert in the last year (the first being Neutral Milk Hotel) that gave me the legitimate feeling of travelling through time. Every DJ set I’d seen before this one, from house parties in Phoenix to clubs in China and Prague, was filled with nothing but all-electronic, drop-centric, nutso maximalist modern EDM. Seeing a legitimate breakbeat oldschool funk and hip hop set, performed with 70s technology and 60-90s records, but by 2015 DJs in a 2015 club to a 2015 crowd, contradicted this experience in a beautiful way.
For instance, usually when I go to a club, the ridiculous, repetitive, noisy music ups my energy and gets me dancing entirely out of its intensity, and I rarely think about what I’m hearing while I’m on the floor. At this show, I had a tremendous appreciation for the music at every moment, both for its historical importance and for the pure sweetness of its grooves. You could see everyone in the crowd dancing, but the whole energy was different. It didn’t feel like these people were here to get wasted and go HAM, it felt like we’d come together to appreciate good music and have fun.
This especially seemed to be true when, about halfway through the set, a legitimate full-blown b-boying circle broke out, where people took turns stepping out to show off their footwork and breakdancing. You’d think not too many people in Prague would be proficient at a style of dance that requires considerable expertise and hasn’t been popular outside of niche groups for about 20 years, but breaker after breaker would come in and completely blow me away. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist even expanded their set past the expected end time to play music particularly catered towards the dancers. I’ve never seen that at a concert before, and I doubt I ever will again.
Shadow and Chemist organized the set chronologically, starting with classic funk and soul artists like James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Grandmaster Flash, and Kool and the Gang. As the set wore on, elements of era after era of music would make appearances, from disco classics to stranger inclusions in Bambaataa’s collection like Kraftwerk and Yes. In this way, the whole show felt like a history of the evolution of hip hop and of music in general, one that you could observe on an intellectual level while enjoying it on an emotional level. And by the end of the set, it was a free-for-all, music of every kind blending in totally unexpected ways.
I’m not saying that old hip hop or old dance music is objectively better than the new stuff. There’s still plenty I don’t like about early hip hop, I would almost never listen to disco music outside of this context, and I’ll still enjoy modern clubs for the entirely different experience they deliver. All I know is, I’ve never seen any DJ set or concert quite like this one, and not only did I have a great time, but I now feel like I have a much fuller understanding of a genre I’m appreciating more and more as I learn more about it. If they release a live album or DVD of this tour, I know I’ll listen to it regularly, but if not, I’ll be just as glad to have experienced this bizarre occurrence as the once-in-a-lifetime show it was.
Steve's Blague 