I was beyond stoked when I heard the announcement that underground hip-hop duo Blue Scholars was gonna be playing a free set at UC Irvine; I had only recently learned about them within the 2 or 3 months before the show but they quickly became constant listening. I thoroughly enjoy hip hop music but it’s rare that I become as enthusiastic about a new hip hop artist as I did after listening to their album “Bayani,” and my friend Mark who introduced me to them is even more enamored. So it was a no-brainer that we would shoot up to Irvine this Friday night to check out their performance.
The show was held in UCI’s Aldrich Park on an outdoor stage as the final performance of a weeklong “Spirit Week” that had consisted mainly of student club performances. My friends and I arrived on campus around 4:30 and spent about an hour at the campus pub before heading out to the park to see what was going on. The layout was similar to the main area of UCI’s annual Wayzgoose festival, with club booths and vendor trucks lining the walkway of the top interior flat lawn of the park near the Natural Sciences and Engineering buildings.
The first thing I noticed was that there was absolutely no one at the area in front of the stage where the crowd should be. At once this made me excited that we would be close up and get an intimate performance; but as a former intern for the ASUCI concerts commission that would have been involved in organizing and promoting an event such as this, the sight of the empty crowd was also a bit disappointing. We found a guy from Hip Hop Congress and asked when Blue Scholars would be performing and I could tell that he was glad somebody had come out for the show but also that he was upset at the lack of campus enthusiasm for such a dope show. He explained to us that the Spirit Week had been chiefly organized by the Pre-Pharmacy Student Group or something like that and they had focused more on school spirit type stuff instead of promoting the headlining performance.
There was still a little over an hour before the performance was set to start so we walked around parts of the Computer Science and Engineering areas drinking down some vodka and blazing some bowls before noticing that small clusters of a crowd were beginning to form near the stage. We watched part of a dance crew, I think it was B-Boys Anonymous, that honestly were pretty sloppy with their breaking, before the main event took place.
As soon as the duo took the stage you could feel excitement in the still rather small crowd of your typical UCI Asians and fratboys. MC Geologic came out wearing like a ley or something around his neck indicative of his super laid back style, calmly confident and effortlessly smooth. His delivery was pretty damn near what it sounds like on record, which is cool because I have seen a number of cool MCs (like Lupe Fiasco a couple years ago again here at UCI) who sounded like completely different people when they performed live.
DJ Sabzi likewise held a confident swagger throughout the performance, sporting an almost preppy. Although there were turntables set up, he never really got into the 1-2’s; to my recollection I don’t remember seeing him use any vinyl at all, let alone lay down some scratches. He mainly stuck to invisible laptop work, which usually really bugs me and was a bit of a let-down, but his beats and live edits were so crucial that it didn’t get on my nerves too much. He mainly hung out in the background contributing back-up vocals to some of Geologic’s lines, but there were a few awesome moments where he laid down full-on verses of his own.
One of the first couple songs they played was “50 Thousand Deep,” which really blew the lid off early on for me. The song, which is about the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, is one of my all-time favorite hip hop tracks and has been on replay a lot lately during car trips with the homies because of its addictively smooth and catchy music and its deeply political lyrics that reach the kind of articulation and analysis that most MCs literally cannot comprehend. All day we had been speculating and hoping they would play this particular track, knowing that even if they didn’t it would be nothing but dopeness all the way through, but still wanting this one.
From there it was all gravy, and really good gravy at that. Geologic asked the crowd “Is it cool if we play some stuff from our first album?” which of course got a great reaction because for the next several tracks it was the songs we were all super familiar with and excited to see performed live. Amongst those was another favorite of mine “Still Got Love” and it’s classic line “not everybody lives, but everybody dies.” The crowd was bumping and the stage was electric, with both performers moving around with the cool conviction they’ve got down to a T.
Something I thought kind-of cheapened the performance was when partway through the student organizers of the event brought out a big box of lame Spirit Week T-shirts and wanted Geologic to help throwing them out. He obliged without any obvious sign of thinking this was lame, but I’m sure he thought that was lame. I mean, just let them play, your event is at an end no need to keep promoting it. That’s something I never completely understood about the way ASUCI planned events; it’s like they never get big announcements of artists and headliners etc out until right before the event, and then they don’t have any legit promotional material like shirts and stuff until the day of. I don’t know, it wasn’t that much of a hitch in the performance but still I thought it a bit unnecessary to barge in on their set like that.
Really the defining element of the performance came when it started raining. It had been sprinkling intermittently on our drive up to Orange County earlier in the day but by around 7 it seemed to have cleared up. Small drizzles began early in the performance but weren’t anything of a nuisance until a little bit past the halfway point when the rain really started picking up and started affecting the equipment onstage. At first Sabzi just put one of the promotional T-shirts over his laptop to cover it from the wet but it started really showering and the backstage people had to bring out tarps to cover up all the Dj equipment and speakers. Geologic joked that they’re from Seattle where it rains all the time and they came to Southern California expecting some nice beach weather but instead they brought Seattle with them!
Even when it started fucking hailing, however, the two performers went on like troopers, never missing a beat or appearing the least bit phased by the torrents that were coming down on us all. Likewise, pretty much the entire crowd that had been there from the start remained, waving our arms in approval and getting all buck nasty in the rain. Before both of their last 2 songs Geologic noted that the fire department is telling them to shut it down, but they’re gonna keep it going. From the way it was pouring I totally believe there was a legitimate risk for electrocution going on but they kept on going for us and I’m glad they did.
Although we all left soaking messes, I can honestly say that was the best hip-hop performance I’ve ever been a part of. From the intimate feeling of the crowd size to the awesome delivery of top-notch music to the unforgettable experience of a kick-ass storm party, this was really one for the books. It’s a shame the people involved in promotion didn’t get the word out to the UCI community better because a group as good as the Blue Scholars deserve more appreciation. They know that the heads who stayed through the hail got love, though.
“Not everybody lives, but everybody dies.”
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