Buck 65, Sage Francis & Boom Bip @ the Venue {Edinburgh, Scotland, September 20th, 2003}
A progressive night descended upon Edinburgh one Tuesday night as a triple bill of out of the box thinkers took stage at the Venue, a night of justified standing around and being entertained. The first on was Canada’s own Buck 65.
He wandered before us like a confused old man, fully immersed in the stereotypical aspects of hick America. For the bulk of his over length set, if he wasn’t chewing on a never ending, hand rolled cigarette or lazily tossing confetti [as if to say “you want some confetti? Here ya’ go. Happy?”], he was taking extraordinarily long breaks between songs to extrapolate on various, seemingly random things such as how the older he gets, the more sense life makes and the less he cares, how an old girlfriend of his appropriately named Ethyl used to screw up all the time, serving him cold coffee, breaking his power tools, and what not, but he never once went upside her head with a mic stand, and how his hotel mounted the toilet paper roll directly behind the toilet making it hard to reach. Playing almost exclusively songs from his newest album Talkin’ Honky Blues, his tales of the worst and poorest dregs of society paint lyrical pictures at the exact opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum from where popular acts rhyme about how successful they are, their diamonds, champagne, and imported sports cars, where image rules reality. Denying crowd participation, telling us to keep our hands in our pockets because throwing them up makes him nervous, he scratched like a man possessed and mimed almost every word he spoke on his way through a high brow set with his tongue almost piercing his cheek.
Sage Francis followed him well quickly digging into a grungy bunch of more subversive lyrically but more conventionally styled songs. Wearing the American flag as a skirt, he pulled out his best Har Mar Superstar impression, challenged the feudal, pseudo-capitalist system, and placated the virtues of thoughtful artistry as opposed to “making another ‘fuck you, faggot’ record.” He rapped with a skill, humour, and intensity not seen often enough these days. I may have witnessed the dawn of a new age, the time for white people to take hip-hop back to its original purpose. Buck and Sage combined to make a lethally compelling and intelligent team that highlights the worst aspects of humanity while encouraging awareness and free will, the finer possibilities of well used poetry.
The headliner Boom Bip provided an aural contrast for the night playing an hour long progressive rock set without so much as a single spoken lyric. A fine mix of electronics, bass, intense guitar, and even more intense drumming, their songs built fairly quickly into a wall of sound that smashed, reset, and smashed again through various stages. They failed to top the intensity of Sage or the accessible entertainment of Buck but what they lacked in showmanship they made up for in sound. It was a show of the highest quality which served both the needs of the adequately educated as well as the dancing fool. If you missed it, you missed out!
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"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." - Hunter S. Thompson
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