Brother Ali | Bowery Ballroom, NYC | 3.27.2008 | From A Silly Rock Kid

posted by Brian on March 31st, 2008 in Brother Ali, Live, Music

So this isn’t where I came from. This isn’t a New Brunswick basement show. There aren’t dudes with some second wave emo black zip up hoodie with a pin on it that signifies how cool they are by the “no-band-name-listed-just-the logo” insignia. This isn’t a hipster-neo-Joy-Division-meets-Daft-Punk wannabe band that scored an 8.2 on Pitchfork that every dude with an ironic mustache has been gushing about that’s better than Panda Bear still playing stuff that sounds like the Beach Boys but it was “way better.”

Yeah, I’m out of my element but it’s still the same.

There’s the diehards…The people waving their hands to every sway and motion with every great rhyme and sick beat that seriously is almost forcing you to shake your hips and nod your head “YES” like it was your job to make sure people in war-torn nations got their government-approved rations. It reminds me of the fist pounding to every lyric from Hot Water Music that brings you back to the feeling “Live Your Heart and Never Follow.”

And there’s the posers. They’re here to be seen, the guys going back to suburban New Jersey to tell their friends, “Yo, it was so sick, I was illin’ to Toki Wright and I felt that shit so hard” but really, they were outside during the entire set, talking to their girlfriend asking her why “she’s mad” and “should I come home to be with you, honey?” Really, it’s not so far from that kid who said they “saw them at their first VFW hall show where there was like 5 kids and they were the only one who knew the words to every song that they did on that split 7″ where they only pressed like 100 copies on marble vinyl.”

And there’s me.

I felt it tonight. Not in that facetious hip-hop “I felt that shit” kinda way. I FELT IT.

The bass thumping, the lyrics (not just easy rhymes or simply a clever way of saying something the same thing you’ve heard in a million hip hop songs), the ENERGY of the crowd. The same vitality I felt seeing Thursday perform “Understanding In A Car Crash” for the first time – watching Geoff swing his mic in the air like helicopter blades over his head, whipping the kids into a roaring frenzy. The set ending freestyle between Ali, Abstract Rude, Toki Wright with BK-One providing the atmospherics was incredible.

This was somewhere you needed to be. Amazing.

P.S. Run-on sentences RULE.
P.S.S. Claire is awesome for introducing me and taking me to my first Hip Hop 101 class.

Brother Ali