Photo credit Brianna Griepentrog
Nobody can dispute that the Pabst Theater Group venues have brought a new caliber of artists to our fair city, but one criticism that has long been leveled against their programming is that rap music only made up a small part of it. To their credit, they’ve made substantial efforts to rectify that situation. Yet, while it’s great to see them taking a more adventurous approach to booking, aside from real A-list superstars and your more esoteric artists, the bulk of hip-hop tours adhere to a set of conventions which, while they may make perfect sense in a club-like setting, just feel sort of strange when translated to an historic theater like the Riverside Theater.
Such was the case with Friday night’s outing from Boosie Badazz and Friends (emphasis on the “friends”), starting with the egregious sponsorship and a slideshow that, once they figured out how to run it, displayed continuous advertisements for, among other things, products branded by the legendary Louisiana rapper, from cologne to vodka to the admittedly intriguing “Rap Snacks.” Given the genre, some shameless commercialism can be forgiven, but it wouldn’t have been so noticeable had the bill given the audience, which was sizable but left the balcony largely empty, something to watch apart from interminable hype-man banter (“any Pisces in the house tonight?”).
None of which is to say that there weren’t any warm-up acts to be had. Quite the contrary, actually: there was an endless parade of them, in varying degrees of quality. Things started with some local flavor courtesy of Cash Ball, who delivered a short but solid set which the corny dancers brandishing giant, charity-style checks and cronies making it rain only distracted from. After another wait came guest-spots from longtime Boosie/UGK associates Webbie and Mo3, who largely focused on their crowd-pleasing collaborations with the headliner but disappeared again all too quickly, leaving the crowd to continually answer the pressing question, sometimes posed by V100 DJs, “Who’s ready for Boosie?”
|
|
As it turned out, everyone in attendance was ready for Boosie, but what they got was another stretch of opening acts, starting with his label’s apparent protégés SBE, a Michigan group whose embarrassing set caused the crowd to immediately stop screaming and waving their phones in the air only to quickly sit down and resume their scrolling. There was yet another distracting group after them, but to be honest they barely registered, in part because the audience was more or less indifferent and in part because the DJ kept randomly deploying gun-shot sound effects and Jamaican horns whenever they happened to be saying their name, not that anyone seemed to care what that may be.
Once the number of people randomly milling around on stage while serving no purpose had become sufficiently ridiculous (somehow, rap entourages are gaseous; they expand to fill the space they’re in), Boosie finally emerged, quickly establishing a shotgun approach that mostly consisted of him belting out the hook to some street-rap classic, be it “My Struggle” or “Smoking on Purple,” before letting the crowd fill in the verses for him. Despite repeatedly boasting that he had enough tunes to keep things going until four o’clock in the morning, he ultimately kept it up for about 45 minutes before suddenly shutting things down, ending a show that, more than anything, just seemed oddly out of place.
