It's a Celebration, Bitches

6 months
52 posts
25,000 words

A sensible person might spend their 25,000 words writing a novel. Instead, I have squandered mine on idle ramblings and obscure endorsements. It is a sad fact that I have now expended more verbiage on this page than I did on my entire undergraduate thesis. Then again, my thesis was insufficiently broad in scope to warrant mention of Fuckly.

Speaking of rap music, Halfz and I saw GZA at the 9:30 Club last night. The opening act was Buckshot, the BDI MC. He looked a great deal like Jaleel White, and was accompanied by fellow DuckDown artist Sean Price, whose album “Monkey Ballz” drops on Tuesday.

The set was hardly thrilling, but did include several amusing exchanges between the two MCs. As it drew to a close, Sean P. remained defiantly on stage as his DJ began playing tracks from his album and his street team emerged with his bottle of Hennessy and flung CDs and posters into the crowd. Sean rhymed along with his own lyrics, sipping his Henny and mugging for his fans, if there were any.

“I’m the best rapper in the whole fucking world,” he declared as he finally left the stage – a claim I might dispute.

The true best MC in the world, the GZA/genius, came out at 10:30. He launched into a medley of one-verse renditions of some better known hits, including “Clan in da Front,” “Fam (members only),” “Crash Your Crew,” and “Liquid Swordz.” The crowd, comprised chiefly of young professionals and would-be thugs from Bethesda, MD, chanted along eagerly.

One highlight of the show was an impromptu tribute to ODB, including the following story: shortly after releasing their first demo together in 1984, GZA and Dirty were on the train together when a guitarist caught their attention. Apparently, Dirty was incensed by GZA’s contribution of 50 cents, and pronounced, “Shit. This fucking guy don’t got talent. We got talent.”

He then proceeded to empty the man’s guitar case of all of its contents.

The second half of the set went into lesser-known material, seeming to leave some in the audience restless. But after “Breaker, Breaker,” GZA explained briefly his disdain for the materialism and emptiness of mainstream hip-hop, citing his preference for the more cerebral “sword style” of lyricism known as Wu-tang and declaring (as he always does) that “Wu is the wind from the sword. Wu, wu, wu, wu. When you hear ‘tang’? That’s your goddamn neck.”

After a few minutes of prepared rhymes performed a cappella whipped the coffee house set into a frenzy, GZA delighted me and Halfz by closing with “Killah Hillz 10304,” requested by a loyal fan. The final lines, “400 barrels of ether/ 200 pounds of reefer/ and 50 immigrants with fake visas,” thrilled us both to no end.

But before calling it a night, GZA launched back into his tirade about the essential futility of content-free rap music. This continued for several minutes.

“Rappers want to talk about bling-bling and ice. Raekwon started that shit, ‘ice.’ You know what? I’ve never heard a rapper call diamonds a precious mineral. That’s what it is, a precious mineral from the earth. Crystalline carbon, motherfucker. That’s where it gets its shine. Learn that shit before you talk about it.”