Originally published at BrooklynVegan.com (read the comments to see the glowing praise about yours truly).
This is the El-Product summer...
The air was so thick Saturday night, that it’s going take weeks to clean off the thick film of hip-hop lathered on the walls of the Fillmore. Your run-of-the mill hip-hop concert consists of an agitated performer hyperaware of the impending doom of his genre; a performer who consciously takes the pulse of hip-hop every thirty seconds, only to lash out at any perceived threat like a cranky old man. Instead, El-P chose to take the pulse of America and lash out at the forces destroying us from within.
EL-P’s on another level like that…
The creative energy he supplied was forward moving even
though the subject matter he covered was steeped in apocalyptic rage. Over the
years, EL-P has crafted an aesthetic which wholly manifested itself into a
perfected visual of doom and disease. He graced the stage covered in bloody
scabs, donning a monkey suit. The atomic bomb landed and EL-P was the only
survivor. He railed against strip malls and the homogeneous tendency of Middle America. He
told tales of late night drug runs on the Lower East Side, which yielded the shittiest coke on earth. He delivered a scathing tract against the Bush administration and indicted them for the pile of bullshit they
sold America.
America is a dirty place. His anti-war screed lead into a blistering version of ‘Up All
Night’ which produced a mushroom cloud of energy and vitriol. As the mosh pit
reached its zenith, an exhausted El-P collapsed on stage and laid motionless
representing the “thousands of soldiers that have died for lies.” His splayed
corpse was soundtracked by Radiohead’s ‘The National Anthem’ and a Tribe Called
Quest's, ‘Can I Kick It.’ When the crowd chanted “Yes you can”, El-P rose from
the dead and finished off his vision of 21st century America in all its fucked
up glory.
DOWNLOAD:
MP3 EL-P - Tuned Mass Damper
More Photos: EL-P @ Fillmore 6/09/07
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