From: applesauceinski@yahoo.com
Newsgroups: rec.music.hip-hop
Subject: self jup caught me smoking a joint in the bathroom (gentleman, put down your salt shields)
Date: Thu, 02 Nov 2000 04:26:14 GMT
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i come in p.e.a.c.e. i know i've been coming kinda sideways lately,
swooping in from left field and randomly shitting on people...i can't
say fatboy's comment didn't make me feel a little guilty. so in an
effort to remedy the situation, while billie moans from my sony's in
the other room, i give you a good old fashioned, 100sumline,
applesauce/chi-a-ski original concert review.

when i first found out about this show a month ago on bahhc.com i
promised myself i'd go. lineup was slated as Aceyalone, Jupiter,
P.E.A.C.E., Mikah 9, Fat Lip, Ed-O.G., Volume 10, Busdriva,
Dreamweavers, Acid Reign and Mic T. I hadn't yet been to the justice
league in my two months in sf, and i'd missed a number of really dope
shows without the slightest bit of remorse (one night in particular
really stands out...mos def, bahamadia, s.v. and somebody
at maritime hall; shadow, latyrx and blackalicious someplace else. both
shows were 20 bucks...friday night...i ended up rolling at club 1015
(electronica shit)).

i've been consistently skipping over various favorite hip hop tapes
sitting on top of my dresser in the morning and instead grabbing "kid
a", miles at the plugged nickel, anything from bjork's catalog and even
amiee mann. i don't even really wear my still-quite-new puma's anymore.

so i need this shit! i need to get spinning at storyville too, but
getting somebody to commit to going out there so i can pitch my story
to the management and drop off some demos has been near impossible. i
feel like i'm betraying my deeply seeded hip hop roots as of late
(since i was 5 years old, fuck you if you think it's dramatic). i miss
loving hip hop like i used to.

but anyway, shit didn't look too eminent. friday night was an all
nighter, spilling on into 10am saturday and costing me over a hundred
dollars (cabs, drugs, covers)....saturday was live too, ending too
close to dawn on sunday. sunday was surreal...i just kind of tried to
get back into the groove, but was pretty much out of commission all
day. and now it's monday and i'm tripping over the contrast
of 15 unread e-mails, "action items", and strict deadlines compared to
smoking cigarettes and hollering at females.

but buddy dude from work is going to go, along with some of his folks.
so now i've got an excuse to go...i can't blow it off so easily (or at
least i'd have a much greater degree of guilt on tuesday when he's
telling me how dope it was and i didn't go).

so i commit to going. mike hollers at 9pm...blah blah blah, we're on
our way, buy a ticket and meet up at some bar across the street on
divisadero. pop in the 2nd edition ("nah man, y'all nuhs is
tripping....i am not talking about no fucking gang. i'm talking about
physical blood that you bleed..."), catch the 5 just as it
pulls up to van ness and mccallister. pop off at divis, stroll
down....something about they can't sell me a ticket. this other dood
has will call tickets and he'll hook me up for 15 bones. no in and
outs til 10:15 (show start)(it's 9:30 now). guess mike will just have
to drink with his peoples cause i'm stuck here listening to dj i-can-
barely-blend-4-bars-then-kill-it-guy.

oh well. drink a couple beers. look at the 30 people. walk over
there. walk back over here. being at shows by yourself during the
beginning part sucks.

it's time for mic t at 10:15 so everybody please rush the
stage!!!...get the fuck up...get the fuck out of here to go ingest a
pall mall cause security will finally let me out for a minute. got
back in and recited "hush the crowd" to myself while mic t did his
thing (tell me j-live doesn't always speak the truth). mic t might
make me chuckle if i overheard a punchline or two on the way to take a
piss or get another sierra nevada at a house party, but with the lights
on him and a hypeman, he's everything that's typical and passe and
boring about opening acts. good flow, decent voice...extremely tired
trying to get the people hyped up antics. something about eating
pussy...whatever though.

he got done and then i got acid reign. a perfectly disgusting project
blowed byproduct brought to you by the good people of goodlifecorp.
everything i hate about underground hip hop right now. double time for
the sake of double time...a bunch of songs i've never heard before and
have no ambition ever to hear again...dj is crabbing because he's
supposed to....angry "undergroundy" beats for all you thinkers out
there.

the most appropriate moment was when i glanced at some girl, and then
glanced back at the stage and saw like 50 people and the light hitting
them just right...and not even one head bobbing, or one person dancing.
just staring at this guy while he gets mad mental in his cerebellum with
a double time flow and nobody catching that witty double entendre
17th century literature/transformers cartoon reference he's so proud
of (hypothetical of course).

this is why i'm always at electronica shit lately...folks dance! they
actually get into what's going on instead of acting all sedated. that
shit's boring.

anyway, acid reign is grating on my last good nerve after 8 minutes so
i'm like fuck it, i'll go smoke this jigga in the bathroom. i scoped
it out earlier and it looked pretty money. so shit's all recessed like
WAAAAY in the back of the building, and there's like one stall at the
end of this hallway like bathroom. put down the lid, sit on the pot,
strategically dangle my right foot out of the stall so fools know
there's somebody in there (no lock on the stall door--of course) and
blaze. there's this ill cavity in the wall behind the toilet that i
can blow smoke into so nobody sees a fat smoke trail (accompanied with
the smell of kind) raising from off the pot.

so dude says "WHO'S IN THERE?"
i don't say anything at first
"WHO'S IN THERE TAKING A SHIT?"
i pop up and look over the door...it's self jupiter.
"awwww, i'm sorry man, i thought you were somebody else".

i guess he recognized the white sauconer and placed it with somebody
else. too bad i had never seen him before that and didn't realize
it was indeed self jupiter that had just interrupted my solo smoke
session. that didn't strike me til he came out on stage to do his part
of the solo rhyme sessions ff would bless us with later.

stumble back into the bar after my successful excursion. looking for a
rum and coke....i forgot dude from work was even coming. i was all
planning on being nice and blowed for the good part of the show by
myself. but there's m.crucek all right. i don't know if he smokes or
not...he's a cool cat (like 30?)...i don't feel totally comfortable
being this blown around him though. i'm pretty stealth when it comes
to masking my vices so i don't think he even knew...just in the nick of
time it's time for 2mex, volume 10 and busdriva.

volume 10 was so so, 2mex was allright and busdriva was on fire. he
seriously had people loosing their heads with his flow. he's a good
(and rare) example of double time i like...double time done well. his
shit is real sharp, clearly delivered...you can catch the witty lines
when it's live without a lot of effort. he's got a bunch
of personality and he's technically out of control. I'd say he killed
folks harder than anybody from ff did, and he's really the orange to
their yellow and red.

that shit was fun, but now here come the dreamweavers. oh great. what
a fucking weak name...i bet these guys can eat a dick. how did they
get so far up in the rotation?

but then they come out and i realize they're made up of l'ronious, some
guy with a coronet (or some cousin of the trumpet...it wasn't a trumpet
though), and some other guy. i forgot what he did....i wanna say he
was the dj, but i'm not so sure.

their shit worked better in theory than in actualization, but they had
their moments. l'ronious proved his solidness to me by ripping every
track....dude's a pillar as far as i'm concerned. i never really bump
imaginarium, but when i realize i have it and give it spins i do dig it
a great deal. i'll never really jock him like i do other emcees, but
he's somebody i'll always be able to listen to and enjoy.

just him over hard beats was real nice, and sometimes him and the horn
got along really well...but other times it seemed too purposely
experimental, just for the sake of being abstract. like the shit
didn't really work, but you could tell people were liking it cause it
was new or different or fusion-ey and this is san francisco.

crowd is thick at this point and folks no longer feel the need to
retreat to a vile little corner of a bathroom to smoke weed. things
are rolling and it's time for ed og.

let me just say this kids:

ed og is old.
ed og has not been dope since the early 90's.
ed og needs a haircut.
ed og writes his rhymes with a mentality from another era (that's
clearly long gone--completely).
ed og still uses the same crafty tricks to get people to say ho that he
did in 1983.

it was shitty to see him up there looking so old. using old guy
slang. incorporating weak call and response shit with a busta rhymes
flair into his new songs trying to hook the crowd. it just didn't
work. but he did do an ill song off of life of a kid in the ghetto
that had people really open. "i got to have it". classic joint. you
can't take what he did away from him.

so it's finally time for the fellowship shop!

the format for tonight is 1∓mp;1∓mp;1∓mp;1=4.

self jup comes first and does some respectable solo shit. all very
clever, well thought out, yet still accessible on first listen. beats
were solid. what do you want me to say, he's self jupiter...you know
what you're getting.

next is mikah. everybody's favorite genius. his shit was all over the
place. he kicked some straight ghetto rap shit, sang this r∓mp;b
junk....flipped it over this drum and bass beat clocking in at like
120/30 bpm's....this dude can pretty much do everything exquisitely,
but he's got a nack for consummately underachieving at it all instead.
he's one of my favorite emcees, so i dug the whole thing, but from an
objective point of view he didn't put on too good of a solo show.
dude's got a hell of an attention fetish...i don't mean to sound so
critical, i've got the same one. it was just like certain little
phrases he said that gave the deepest insights into what's really
happening in his think tank....i don't know if i can fully explain what
i'm starting to talk about so i'll just leave it be.

now peace. I totally forgot about his whole accident and how recent it
was. i didn't even think of it until the mc said "up next,
peeeeeeeeaccccccccce!". i started thinking that this might be his
first show since the accident, but i don't know that.

but it kind of hurt to see dude. it was like seeing a fragment of the
person that came before. really reminded me of this outgoing, life of
the party kid i went to college with in milwaukee. dude was always
doing keg stands, cracking jokes and macking....got in a major car
accident and tore up his mug. homeboy had DEEP scars all over his face
from going through the windshield of a 93 oldsmobile....lucky to be
alive. whenever you see him at parties now he's real reserved and soft
spoken...he tries not to draw attention to himself.

well imagine an emcee up on stage trying not to draw attention to
himself. no disrespect intended WHATSOEVER, but peace's left hand is
fucked up. he's only got like 4 fingers, and it's scarred really bad.
it looks kind of mutated...i don't want to go into too much detail,
i'll just say it's really fucked up.

so he comes out and gives props to sf cause he heard there was a benefit
show for him here when he was in the hospital. he's fine in everyother
respect, except for some scars on his forearm and bicept. but when he
starts rhyming, i notice that he's really missing the personality and
fire
i'm used to seeing/hearing from him. he had his cousin with him, and
dude would jump in quite a bit....peace would kind of retreat to the
back of the stage and he would ALWAYS kind of turn to the left to
hide his left hand from the crowd. i don't know if he was even doing
it consciously, but he was doing it like every 8 bars. it just felt
really
uncomfortable all the way around. here he was calling attention to
how fucked up his hand was every few minutes, but then ducking
to the back of the stage to hide it....his cousin was ok (low ok)
and he was waaaaaaay out of his league. he might have belonged
on the stage an hour and a half ago, but not at 12:45.

pretty much all the songs they did were wack to me. they were kind
of going half steam, fucking around....some shit with a chorus that went
"cause i'm a hustla!" over and over again. songs that were more
chorus than verses....lots of repeating semi-catchy phrases. shit was
weak.

peace did freestyle a little bit, and his shit was still sharp. he
really only got open for a minute though. for like a minute/minute and
a half he was just loose...really killing it. completely the peace of
old. but then his time was up and it was time for acewonner.

ace had the early signs of laryngitis or something. i know they just
did a show the night before in santa cruz, so maybe he got too
rowdy...or maybe he'd just been screaming a lot the past couple days.
his sense of meter was all there, and he was hitting the 8th notes, but
his voice was just missing some of the umph and it was crackling a
bit. he still killed it...folks love ace.

rappers rappers rappers 12 for 10 got me wide open and i tripped when
i saw how much everybody was in to "the grandfather clock". i just
can't see folks really getting into a tune like that at a show like
they would makeeba or guidelines or greatest show on earth.

so after they all did their solo shit, they united "like voltron" and
freaked classic shit. all of their solo efforts (sans ace) suffered
from new song syndrome, being they didn't want to do anything the crowd
knew (i.e. shit they've all done 10,000 times). they wanted to do that
new new new shit, that's going to be so ill, but i don't know any of
the lyrics and i'm hearing the beat for the first time so i can really
only get into it so much. but when they got together they had the west
coast crowd just flipping, screaming the lyrics to every song at the
tops of their voices....then shit was truly ill.

they dicked around for a while pumping out classic renditions of way
cool, pure thought, bullies of the block, 7th seal, shammy's, when
the moon took a day off and the sun stood still, six tray and some
other shit. i was really hoping to see can you find the level
of difficulty in this, but no dice. they rocked til 2 when house rules
said they had to quit though, so i can't complain.

so anyway, i really needed this show. to get me back on a blowed
kick where i listen to abohl, then innercity griots, then the tape
of random rare blowed shit tim brown sent me, then selected cuts
from fatjack's recent comp. then switch to an early 90's east coast
kick where epmd, pete rock and cl smooth, step in the arena,
showbiz and ag's first, and masta ace take over my walkman.
then to a dungeon fam kick where it's all outkast and goodie
for a week and a half....

since getting my veins pumped full of hip hop again i've abstained
from wearing shineable shoes, black/grey dress pants, listening
to depressing chick music, and subtly high posting people on the
bus. it's so easy to accept yupdom when it's forced upon you
knameen. here's a cell. here's a laptop. here's a fat check. start
sweating bourgeois broads. listen to more bop. shop at the gap.

of course these things aren't mutually exclusive, it's just easy
to get in funks...or to drift towards something? an image? a
lifestyle? uhhhhhnuhhh.

this show/post ought to set me straight for a while. I guess i can
be a dickhead on rmhh again for a grip....

respectfully,

applesauce

"god's an over-advertised lie"
--busdriva