Daily Archives: October 15, 2012

A$AP Rocky, Schoolboy Q, Danny Brown

The Egyptian Room at Old National Centre

Wednesday, October 10

The pungent smell of weed smoke and Black & Milds wafted down the stairs as I waited in line for my tickets to the LongLiveA$AP tour at the Egyptian Room at Old National Centre. It was a night of post-racial celebration and generational kinship under the guise of military imagery, odes to marijuana and good ol' fashioned hip-hop hedonism. In the words of A$AP himself "It's two thousand twelve, two thousand thirteen. Race doesn't matter. We're not black or white, but we're all purple."

I missed the bulk of opener Danny Brown's short set but luckily caught the last few songs dealing mostly with ingesting various prescription pills and smoking "blunt after blunt after blunt after blunt." Like the rest of the performers on the LongLiveA$AP tour, Brown is an artist who simply couldn't have existed in the hip-hop sphere ten years ago. He pounced around in skinny jeans and a long, slim-fitting V-neck and an asymmetrical haircut, and delivered rhymes like a strangled B-Real after raiding his grandmother's medicine cabinet -- a nasal yap hinting at a special brand of insanity. Brown seems to be a descendent in a long line of hip-hop weirdos -- Kool Keith immediately comes to mind -- and his presence set a precedent for the night i.e. it was a show that refused to fully submit to hip-hop's traditionally heteronormative values.

Schoolboy Q followed Brown and by comparison seemed ludicrously normal. He arrived on the stage in a hoodie and sunglasses, muscling through a spirited set peppered with personal anecdotes about his personal struggles and love affair with marijuana. Green smoke plumes scattered through the air during his set (and frankly, pretty much the whole night) rendering the stage's smoke machines redundant. Q is a dynamic performer though - seeming sensitive, tough and personable simultaneously. His amped set prepared the crowd for the bizarre spectacle that was A$AP Rocky.

As the interim music played on full blast, a giant banner depicting soldiers raising an upside down American flag on Iwo Jima against a beating red sun was unveiled. The DJ table was clothed in camouflage mesh and two upside down American flags flanked the stage. After a spoken-word intro complete with helicopter and gunshot sounds, A$AP arrived on the stage donned in all black and wrapped in the stars and stripes. His set was marked by hits from his debut mixtape LiveLoveA$AP, the somewhat underwhelming appearance of the A$AP Mob and a few more spoken word interludes, including an especially haunting one that paired a washed out recording of The Mamas and the Papas "California Dreaming" with graphic war sounds. It was almost a theatrical production - one that used a war aesthetic to symbolize what he called a "struggle against being misunderstood."

A$AP Rocky seems like he lives inside the pop culture zeitgeist. He's a Harlem native whose sound seems more rooted in futurism and hazy, mid-tempo Houston hip-hop than anything found in New York. He preached a post-racial message that resounded with the diverse crowd. Amidst a financial recession and global anxiety, he told the crowd that, much like him, we could do whatever we wanted to. And that night, it all seemed possible.

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Review: A$AP Rocky at the Egyptian Room at Old National Centre

Conceptual clocks were set every which way, calendars were meaningless, and the durable Rush trio was right on time for the first of its two shows at the Air Canada Centre on Sunday. The semi-legendary band is touring its latest album, Clockwork Angels, a thematic record inspired by H.G. Wells/Jules Verne-styled retro-futurism yesterdays imagined tomorrow land of steam-powered gadgets, adapted to flavour the bands accessible brand of Byzantine rock.

A three-hour concert saw furnace blasts of fire and belches of steam, literally and figuratively. There were old songs and new, and three drum solos at least. It all ended with a strong exit of parts of 2112, a forecasting album made 36 years ago and now a century ahead of its time.

On a stage of whimsical props and steam-punk gadgetry, the non-misfiring night began with Subdivisions, a thing of grandiose eighties synthesizer rock and tumbling drum fills that concerns urban planning, conformity and the restless dreams of youth. The Big Money followed, set to big-screen imagery of commercialism and cash registers, and cheered by audience members who had paid $70 to $160 to hear bassist-keyboardist Geddy Lee in high vocal shrill.

Lee, in shaded granny glasses, hippie hair and Chuck Taylor sneakers, is rather avuncular at the age of 59. Guitarist Alex Lifeson, also 59, used his collection of Gibson products to produce squealing solos and quick-fingered, high-fretboard note-hitting jumbo-screen close-ups of which enabled us to count the carats of his wedding ring. Drummer Neil Peart, who continues to morph into a sad-faced Buster Keaton look-alike at the age of 60, wore an African prayer cap and sat within an outstanding drum kit that had more chrome to it than a sixties Chrysler factory.

After that, things settled a bit, with a set list that disregarded well-known material and, after a short intermission, settled into the songs of Clockwork Angels, presented with a string ensemble. The crowd was politely appreciative of (though hardly wound up over) offerings strong in synchronized musicianship and a graceful sort of fury. What I would call a heavy, loud sereneness prevailed.

Rush makes serious music; the Peart-penned lyrics of Clockwork Angels were influenced by Voltaires Candide and John Barths The Sot-Weed Factor. It all distills into a vision, as Peart has explained, of one of many possible worlds, driven by steam, alchemy and intricate clockworks.

And yet part of Rushs charisma is its lack of self-seriousness. Some of the concert experience involved Monty Python-like animations on the big screen behind the band, as well as quirky high-budget vignettes starring actor Jay Baruchel and, as jokester gnomes, the members of the band.

The Clockwork Angels set had begun with the busy, shifting music of Caravan, with the line, In a world where I feel so small, I cant stop thinking big. That kind of thinking is a theme of the bands career a three-piece outfit of high-minded misfits, a group with no time or concern for expectations and naysayers. The train continues, powered by untraditional imagination and weird ticking.

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The future according to Rush runs like clockwork