Face Paint and (Playful) Fistfighting for This Tribe in Brooklyn
By the time the Kansas City rapper Tech N9ne closed his Monday night concert with “I’m a Playa,” a song that rips off Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” wholesale, there was no room left for shock, or awe, or revulsion, or thrill.
For well over an hour at this show at Warsaw, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, he had been upending hip-hop orthodoxies and splicing together reference points in disorienting fashion for an audience of a few hundred fanatics. There was intricate fast rapping, and there were party chants. There was grotesque subject matter and mundane subject matter. There were synchronized dance routines with his fellow artists Kutt Calhoun and Krizz Kaliko. There were post-G-funk slow beats and aggressive, nervous fast ones. There were the stripes of paint lining his face, giving the effect of a warrior staring down battle.
All together, it was certainly without precedent, and possibly without sense. It wasn’t wholly unlike watching hip-hop from another country, where the basic structural elements survive but are rendered unrecognizable by the manner in which they’re deployed.
Tech N9ne is a strong rapper, but that barely matters; it’s not even one of the half-dozen most important things about him, given how he’s pioneering new sounds in an off-the-radar hip-hop hub. On Monday, he was headlining the Strange Days Tour 2010, featuring acts from his record label, Strange Music, which has been in operation for a decade. Of late it has become a small independent powerhouse — he has sold more than a million albums, rather quietly — following in the model, and sometimes the mood, of Psychopathic Records, the imprint of the Michigan horror-comedy rappers Insane Clown Posse.
But while this traveling band of misfits was far from home, they were not unwelcome. For almost four hours, the crowd — mostly young men, several shirtless, many with their faces painted — was intensely engaged, rapping along to even the more obscure artists on the lineup. Periodically, a mosh pit swelled and subsided, but mostly swelled. A small young woman in full face paint punched a young man in the face, and he offered to let her do it again, repercussion-free. One person said she saw a fan punch a security guard.
And yet there was no prevailing sense of mayhem here: as rowdiness goes, it was orderly, perhaps because this was a rare area appearance for Tech N9ne and his brood. Between acts, the kids crowded the well-stocked merchandise stand, loading up on T-shirts and CDs. After all, who knew when this roadshow might make it back to these parts?
Brotha Lynch Hung, from Sacramento and the most veteran artist on the bill apart from Tech N9ne, told the crowd it was his first time in Brooklyn. He has been making sinister and often sadistic records since 1993, though his strain of bizarre is different from his label boss’s. (He signed to Strange Music last year, after years on West Coast independent labels.)
Thanks largely to his subject matter, Brotha Lynch Hung remains one of the great unheralded rappers, and his new album, “Dinner and a Movie,” won’t do much to change that: it’s characteristically sordid, and characteristically great.
Near the end of his too-brief set, one lanky young man began pushing others in the crowd around, and within a minute he had stirred up his own mosh pit: in the context of this night, it was the highest compliment possible.
