Due perhaps to the somewhat low-key response of the crowd early into his performance, NYC-based rapper J-Live staged a little pop quiz during last Saturday’s show at Eclectic. After only a few songs, he stopped the music.
“I just want to make sure y’all been listening to me out there,” he said. “What was the name of my DJ?”
The audience had, in fact, been paying attention.
“Spinna,” everyone shouted out. J-Live, satisfied, signalled Spinna to restart the beat, and the show commenced anew. As if chastened by their emcee’s subtle chiding, the people packed tight in the hot room picked up the pace and began to dance. Heads in the back of the room started to nod. Kids moved off the wall and onto the floor.
J-Live’s performance deserved a good response. A relatively underground but much-lauded artist, he rhymed dynamically over danceable beats, and clever lyrics defined his flow. His is the kind of intelligent hip-hop University students should dig: J-Live, after all, did receive his SUNY undergraduate degree in English. Despite the limited space and thus relatively small crowd characteristic of Eclectic shows, J-Live continued to feel his public, engaging the crowd with his “5-50-500-5,000” call-and-response method.
“It’s a motto of mine about being consistent on stage even when there’s a low turn out,” he once explained in an interview on his website. “I use it and explain it sometimes to get the crowd amped.”
And so on Saturday:
“I’ve got this thing I like to do,” he said. “If we’ve got a crowd of five, we try to make it feel like 50. If we’ve got a crowd of 50, we try to make it feel like 500. If it’s 500, 5,000.”
And then in unison, on cue, hands in the air, everyone repeated, “five…fifty…five hundred…five thousand.”
Dan Nixon ’05, who lives in Eclectic, said he was just passing through the room to go upstairs but ended up staying for much of the show.
“J-Live was smoking,” Nixon said.
J-live’s performance—which lasted until just after 2 a.m. when the lurking Public Safety officers finally declared it over—crowned an evening of stellar hip-hop at Eclectic. It had been a long night anyway, having begun around 10 with local rapper Killah Dik.
It was when Lyricist Lounge rapper Wordsworth took the stage around midnight that the show began in earnest. Eloquent, quick, and impressively on-point, the solo emcee’s performance impressed the house more so, perhaps, than even J-Live’s was to do. He cracked up the crowd with battle-esque freestyle disses on students in the front row and impressed them with his gritty, smart rhymes.
“I actually liked Wordsworth more than J-Live,” said Nicole Peterson ’05. “You know, people just really enjoy freestyling, which he did a lot of.”
Matt Desan ’05 echoed the sentiment that Wordsworth was the better performer.
“I really liked Wordsworth, but I thought J-Live was just alright,” he said. “I’ve seen him give better shows before. He didn’t have much energy, but then again I don’t blame him, considering the audience.”
Brooklyn-based Wordsworth (who, like J-Live, majored in English in college) is probably best known for his involvement with MTV’s sketch comedy “Lyricist Lounge Show,” which he co-created, wrote, and starred in. He has recorded tracks with J-Live, Soulive, A Tribe Called Quest, and Blackstar and is set to release his first full-length album on Halftooth Records in June. Words and J-Live have been touring together since J-Live released his latest album, “Always Will Be,” this winter.
“I was more into Wordsworth—as a person too, not just as a performer,” said Andreas Gurewich ’05, who helped coordinate the event with Peter Siedman ’04. “I’m glad that there was a big turn-out. It’s really only once or twice a semester that there are shows like this at Wesleyan.”
Saturday’s J-Live/Wordsworth show, organized by the student group BREATHE (Building Respect Equality and Activism through Hip-Hop Expression), ended up topping off a veritable weekend extravaganza of hip-hop at Eclectic. Just the night before the Toronto-based group Pocket Dwellers had performed their Jazz- and funk-infused brand of hip-hop in the same space. Brought to campus by the World Music Collective, Pocket Dwellers entertained much the same crowd as J-Live, as many students attended both shows.
The Hip-Hop double feature did not affect the crowd’s energy, according to Gurewich.
“They didn’t want J-Live to get off, and they were screaming for him to come back on as Public Safety was trying to shut the show down,” he said. “It seemed like the crowd was feeling it a lot. It was a great reception.”
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