Faraone in Montreal, Day 4: Swinging Like Tarzan
[While the rest of the staff is busy duncecapping-and-kazooing its way through the usual July 4 activities, Phoenix rap critic Chris Faraone has left the country and is doing lots of drugs. We rejoin him at Montreal's Jazz Fest, already in progress.]
GZA's Liquid Swords: drunk, or just human?
MONTREAL -- I must have sniffed a kilometer of blow last night. Not really, but isn’t that funny? Get it – they have the metric system up here, which, from what I can tell, is the only disadvantage about Canada. Everything else is better in Montreal; you can smoke weed and drink in public, the women are way hotter, people are hella nicer, and the cops are so cool that Canadian rappers don’t even rhyme about killing them.
Since I’m not sure where to begin, I’ll move chronologically. Right after filing my dispatch yesterday I had a drink with Mitch Myers, the acclaimed author of The Boy Who Cried Freebird, a National Public Radio correspondent, and, most importantly, a part-time columnist for High Times. Meeting Mitch was not just an honor, but also a reminder as to how little I know; I understand French better than I understood his jazz talk. If I’m ever going to start actually writing about music instead of just commenting on how wasted I get all day, I’ll have to keep hanging out with guys like him.
They have a term around here for people who wear credential leashes when they’re outside of Jazz Fest: “assholes.” I don’t care though; I like rocking things around my neck, and since I can’t afford an icy rope chain, festival passes work fine. Yesterday, however, I removed it at my friend Adam’s request when we went for smoked brisket at the world famous Schwartz’s Deli.
While at first I wasn’t excited about sitting Benihana-style at Schwartz’s, we turned out to have a good crew. To my left was an old-school black gentleman who was visiting his friend and hitting all the outdoor shows; like most jazz heads I’ve met up here, he was simply elated to be around so much soul. To my right there was a cool ass DJ duo from Toronto called the Ill Kidz who I’m going to watch spin at some uber-bourgeois club tonight.
Montreal is the most authentically hip-hop city that I’ve ever been to. Walls everywhere are decked with serious graf murals; there are record stores on every other block (corporate and non-corporate); and – get this – yesterday I saw a group of twenty kids breaking on the sidewalk. Let’s face it: New York belongs to racist wealthy yuppie scumbags and tasteless hipster phonies. Boom-bap might have started there, but it’s hard to call Gotham hip-hop’s home when twits like JR Writer claim Harlem and the NYPD has a task force specifically charged with exterminating rap culture. Hip-hop can’t breathe in a lot of U.S. cities, which is why it’s only natural that it flourishes in places where people are less ignorant, more open-minded, and, to put it bluntly, less bigoted.
Nowhere was Montreal’s passion for hip-hop more evident than at last night’s RZA and GZA show at Metropolis. The spirit went way beyond the hundreds of Wu-Tang t-shirts, many of which, I should note, looked new, unlike the ratty ones from the Wu-Wear days that all my fellow lowlife Massholes break out at the annual Clan show in Worcester. People are still extremely into Wu-Tang here; most were familiar with tracks from the RZA album that dropped last week.
Not all was peachy though. Before RZA took the stage, and before GZA performed “Liquid Swords” from front to back, we had to sit through one of the most excruciating sets in the history of live music. The group, Stone Mecca, which later backed RZA more than competently, straight up sucked on its own. They call it neo-soul; I call it junk-ola. Canadians are truly sweet people; had they tried this shit at a Wu-Tang show below the border, they’d have been booed back to Los Angeles.
I wasn’t the only one disgusted; one of the soundmen told me that GZA refused to come out before the DJ re-warmed the crowd. Actually I’m lying; the soundman told the Narcysist, the MC from the legendary Montreal rap group Euphrates, and the Narcysist told me. I have to plug my boy here; watching Narcy in the club was like watching that scene in Coming To America where they’re at the St. John’s game and the two janitors recognize that Eddie Murphy is royalty: “Just some people who I met in the bathroom.” Narcy has that effect on people. And while I’m slinging Eddie references, the band I would most compare Stone Mecca to is Sexual Chocolate.