It’s 2012! Why should we be excited about indie rap in the northeast?
We are witnessing a trend right now in indie rap of higher caliber performers coming forward with distinct and exciting live sets. Gone are the early 2000′s when technology had just started making it easy for anyone with a computer to both produce their own album using cheap music editing software and burn it onto CD for distribution. The average live shows of this era were largely crowded with artists who had not practiced their craft enough to have it ready for live display.
Don’t think that I mean that the music was terrible, just that due to the tendency of many performers to simply put beats on a CD and use that as the backing track to their live vocals resulted in some very half baked performances. Not because using backing tracks on CD is ineffective but because it’s so simple. Think about it: for a band to work up a live show, they have to make sure that they all know the parts, they have to put in significant amounts of practice time to even be halfway listenable. When all you have to do is make a track list and press the space bar, you might be a little less intimately familiar with the material. This opened the door for the less dedicated to step onto stage.
Unfortunately, this surge of uninspired performances led to a lot of fans falling off and general degradation of the scene.
Fast forward to 2012, and many of those acts have stopped doing live shows altogether, finding the indie scene a bit more difficult to thrive in than anticipated and largely unrewarding. This gives some breathing room for truly dedicated individuals to step forward and put together some unique and memorable shows.
I’m talking about acts like Ceschi Ramos in Connecticut, whose eclectic, highly passionate sets are worth far more than you pay to see them. I’m talking about ReCaaLL in Boston, whose performances often revolve around masks and theatrics and are punctuated by poignant ranting.
In New Hampshire you have eyenine, whose razor sharp rap sets are generally regarded as some of the fastest and most finely honed in the area, as well as recent transplant P.T. Burnem, who works beat machines while simultaneously rapping with an aggressive accuracy.
These acts tend to be one man affairs, but unlike traditional one man acts, their orchestration is potentially unlimited with machines doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Jim Morrison of the Doors prophetically spoke of this sort of setup in an interview 30 years ago saying “I can kind envision maybe one person with a lot of machines… singing or speaking, and using machines.” I enjoy this sort of empowerment of one mind, especially if they have a coherent message. I think it also reflects the more general future potential of machines to empower a single consciousness to generate many signals simultaneously.
This is the future of music performance evolving right in front of our eyes. Exciting no?
- J. Falconcrest
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