There’s no mystery, I am not a rap/hip hop person, I find their rhythms overly repetitive and their avalanche of words so hard to follow,…. May be they are too smart for me, and may be their lyrics are too violent for me. I can’t even explain the difference between rap and hip hop, although I think Dilated Peoples are hip hop, right? Oh well, I read this ‘Rap is something you do, hip-hop is something you live’ (coming from rapper KRS-One) and these guys seemed to totally live what they were singing.
First of all, let me tell you that our presence (I was with my family) in the waiting line was singled out by a guy who was wondering whether we were really waiting for the show, may be we were just trying to enter the store? It’s true that I didn’t see many girls and almost no women! It was a crowd of young guys and men, skateboarders, hip hop aficionados, but I have been to Amoeba for all kinds of shows and I am totally used to this: each time it is a new adventure.
Dilated Peoples had an in-store show at Amoeba on Tuesday night for the release of their new and first album since their 2006 release, ‘20/20’. Eight years is a long time, so I suppose you can call this a come-back. Evidence, Rakaa (Iriscience), and DJ Babu (yes, I got to know these dilated peoples in question) have had their own solo careers but have finally teamed up together for ‘Directors of Photography’ released this same day on Rhymesayers.
Honestly, I have the worst opinion about rappers, they are always mad at each other, always fighting and killing each other, but these guys looked like the opposite of that, they seemed so positive and peaceful. Although I could not get everything they were saying in their songs as rap/hip hop is always a deluge of words and rhymes, and I couldn’t digest everything at once, their brand of rap or hip hop sounded like a relic of the past to me, the old rap that young guys used to blast in their large cars in the movies of the 90s.
‘Finding 100% sample-based Hip Hop albums in 2014 is almost a rarity, but Directors of Photography is the exception’, wrote HipHoppdx, ‘There are no fancy effects or contemporary trends, like synths or EDM beats, which makes the album truer to its roots than most other recent veteran releases’. Effectively, they sounded very old school, and all the people packed in the rows at Amoeba were waving their arms in the air the whole time, responding to the great chemistry between Evidence and Rakaa. There were a lot of ‘Go, go go’… ‘Let’s go’ of encouragement but it wasn’t really necessary, people stayed enthusiastic from start to finish.
The title of the album comes from Evidence’s big interest in photography, and they did ‘Good as Gone’, the show-me-love-for-Aloe-Blacc ‘show Me the Way’, ‘Directors’ as well as a few others, but when they asked for requests at the end of the show, ‘songs of the new album or classics?’, people screamed ‘classics!’….’Can we do one more of the album?’ said Evidence, and this is what they did, followed by a classic, ‘Worst Comes to Worst’. I knew none of the lyrics, contrarily to people around me, I was just trying to understand what they were saying…. Their rhymes made me smile and they were really the nicest people around, as Evidence told he wanted to meet and talk to everybody after the show despite the fact they had another show (their album release party) at the Whisky the same day. Why Hip Hop can’t be more about these thoughtful and well crafted songs instead of the commercial violent trash that has become the norm?
