Tufts’s Hotunga Café sits in the middle of the campus, its quaint wood-paneled walls adorned with vintage lacrosse sticks and ye olde college pennants. It dispenses the caffeinated nectar that keeps young minds buzzing. If those minds need a break from their studies, there’s a coach cove in one corner complete with a 50-inch television, where coeds can snuggle up to a hearty game of NBA Live 2006 . It is not the most idyllic setting for Edan, the self-proclaimed “one-man arsenal,” to pull off a hip-hop show. And yet, as he always does, he made it work a week ago Thursday.
Local up-and-comers Blanks. stirred the students to a fever pitch with a set of dancetastic rhythms and upbeat, jangly guitar lines. But rather than build on that momentum, Edan let the air out of the room so he could build it slowly back up his own way. The self-proclaimed Humble Magnificient started with a DJ set, spinning mostly downtempo ’60s and ’70s funk, soul, and acid rock. At one point he looked up from his seamless mixing, queried, “Y’all bored? Fuck it,” and simply carried on his merry way.
When the mood was just right and the peeps were settled into a sleepy groove, Edan picked up the mic, announced, “All right, I’m ready now,” and dropped hard and heavy verses from his heralded full-length, Beauty and the Beat , and the much earlier Primitive Plus (both on Lewis Recordings). As he was rapping the light fantastic, he was joined by Dagha, a relatively new foil to the Edan live-show experience — but already the pair were trading rhymes, rocking synchronized dance steps, and intertwining verses layered with a delay-pedal afterglow.
During “MCs Smoke Crack,” Edan passed the delay box to Dagha and descended from the stage, prattling and rattling on a flawless six-minute verse while pressing the flesh with nearly every audience member. He roamed the venue from the balcony to the checkout counter, shaking hands without missing a single beat. Your humbled reporter was graced with an introduction but dismayed by the dude’s cold-fish grip: apparently his “passionate mic clutch” does not extend to the salutational hand grab.
The most striking thing about Edan, even more than his charcoal three-dollar thrift-store suit, is his hair. It can’t be ignored. A big, messy mop wilding out atop the b-boy’s dome, it makes him look more like a Woodstock-era folk singer than a modern day DJ/producer/MC mastermind. That visual cue became even more pronounced when E took a break from dropping beats and grabbed an acoustic guitar, upping his resemblance to the young Bob Dylan. He did this only twice, and instead of rapping over his strums, he took to whistling and kazoo blowing, handling the six-string as deftly as his mixer and prompting hurrahs from the proletariat. At that point, I wasn’t sure whether we were at a hip-hop show or The Muppet Show, but the showmanship was undeniable.
