I have two patriotic middle fingers raised for the obnoxious pig in the broken-down Yukon GT on Route 1 last Saturday, and for all the other Kenny Chesney fans who clogged metro Boston’s southbound arteries like cholesterol from noon forward. Thanks to that hick pop frat boy’s concert at Gillette Stadium, it took me three hours to get to Mansfield and the hip-hop event of 2008.
I wasn’t the only one held back from “Rock the Bells” by fleets of ugly persons driving Chevy Avalanches. Legendary “Fuck Whitey” rappers Dead Prez got stuck as well. Didn’t help their rep for never being on time for any show ever.
By the time I showed, Rakim was stepping on stage. This Chesney character and his wretched henchmen had made me miss Immortal Technique, MURS, and Jay Electronica. If it hadn’t been for the seven hours of head nodding I still had ahead of me, I might have been bitter.
But between the $100-or-so worth of overpriced, plastic-bottled Budweisers that I drained and the contact high from the cocaine blunts that the 15-year-old scumbags behind me were chain-burning (hey, what else smells like that?), I got mellow enough to forget about the traffic. I even got my sense of humor back when Raekwon and Ghostface Killah surfaced with a white hype man who had to shield his mouth through the torrent of N-bombs in their set.
Redman was equally refreshing. Following the disappointing announcement that “Method Man had some other shit to do in New York,” he delivered a raucous, cameo-studded performance. In the course of a half-hour he was joined by DJ Kool of “Let Me Clear My Throat” fame, Wu-Tang B-list all-star Street Life, and Cypress Hill hero B-Real, who delivered a lit blunt to a jonesing Redman on stage.
Not even Mos Def or A Tribe Called Quest saw fit to address country music’s conspiracy to block hip-hop fans from attending this year’s “Rock the Bells.” Nas, however, came close with his introduction to “Sly Fox,” which he dedicated to “That faggot-ass nigga Bill O’Reilly.”
