Ground Control's coverage of the Paid Dues Festival is in three parts. This is Part I. Click here to read Part II and Part III.
You almost didn't read this. Maybe because it was a hip-hop show, or maybe because it was San Bernardino, but either way, security confiscated my pencils and pen as I walked through the gates for the Paid Dues festival. The pen was snatched from my bag immediately, but the pencils presented problems. “Is a pencil okay?” asked one guard. “Well, I guess you could stab someone with it.” And bam, that would have been the end of things, because seven hours and nine performances doesn't lend itself to going from memory, and even with notes it's hard to reassemble a coherent version of such a uniformly kick-ass show.
But luckily, a flash of the press wristband was enough to get waved through—with everything intact—and into a sea of kids with Paid Dues backpacks and guys handing out their demos to anyone who would make eye contact. With merch stands and tents selling seven dollar beers, funnel cakes and bacon wrapped hot dogs, it felt like a county fair, and a step into the exhibit hall where the stage was had me ready to throw a hypothesis or two onto some tri-fold poster board. Hypothesis one: Seven hours away from the headliner, with one of the more out-of-left field artists in hip-hop about to take the stage, I figured that the crowd would be fairly small, and would grow as the day went on until a frenzied house would cheer on Sage Francis. Hypothesis two: Boot Camp Clik would be fucking awesome, for the sole reason that they are Boot Camp Clik and are therefore fucking awesome (obviously the scientific method is not my strong suit).
From press, from promotional photos, from rumors and stories and the occasional video (and that old copy of Black Elvis/Lost In Space that got stolen four freaking days after I bought it), I halfway expected Kool Keith to be about one step away from being a three-headed green alien, not some dude in a pink t-shirt and jeans. But that was Kool Keith. No Black Elvis to be seen, and even though his side-man yelled out “Dr. Octagon is in the house!” before Keith launched into “Blue Flowers,” the man himself denied it, saying “I ain't Dr. Octagon tonight.” Hypothesis one seemed to be correct, as kids filtered out after two or three songs with quizzical looks on their faces, not quite sure what to make of this legend they had heard so much about, wanting to seem cool but having trouble bouncing to Keith's rhymes, which were mostly two or three levels above the haze of the average weed-soaked concert-goer's comprehension
And then there was the crowd. Kids crammed up against the barricades, begging security for water from the cooler placed at the foot of the stage, unwilling to move from the spots they staked out when the doors opened at 2 PM. Surrounding them was an odd mix of bros, hipsters, a few punks with pink streaks and studded belts, a pair of dudes in cargo shorts and Teva sandals, and of course your stereotypical hip-hop fan. With slight variations, you might see the same exact crowd at Ozzfest, about ten miles down the road from here in another three or four months, or a couple weekends later at KROQ's annual Inland Invasion festival. There were the girls there who were obviously in attendance to please some dude, along with the record junkies declaring “it's the best cut I've ever heard…if you get it on the vinyl.”
Boot Camp Clik came out in ones and twos, throwing out tracks from the members' various projects. First out was Smif-N-Wessun, with Tek and Steele busting through “Last Time” and “Let's Git It On,” pitting the crowd against itself in an extended battle two see who was the loudest (say “fuck that side” “FUCK THAT SIDE!” / say “fuck that side” “FUCK THAT SIDE!”) and growling their way through a few hits before being joined by Sean Price, Buckshot and finally Rock. As they traded off mic duties on “I Got Cha Opin” and “How Many MCs,” various members would fade to the back, standing up against the massive DJ riser or slipping off to the side stage instead of bouncing around playing hype-man like some of the later acts. With a quick look around, you could see fans rhyming along to every word of “Leflaur Leflah Eshkoshka” or shouting out “roll that shit/light that shit/smoke it.” Buckshot (who one girl in the crowd described as 'tiny') took the lead as the group closed out its forty-minute set with “Who Got da Props?” off Black Moon's Enta Da Stage.
As each artist would exit the stage at the end of their set, there would be an exodus of kids in pink wristbands towards the VIP section. For those who were willing to drop the coin, the VIP tickets got access to a full bar, a backpack full of SanDisk goodies and a poster that was too big to fit inside, and a chance to get said poster signed at the artist meet and greet. But they only had ten minutes to accomplish it, because just as your breathing would return to normal following the hustle, the dual screens would flash the name of the next artist, and it was back into the crowd we'd go.
In stark contrast to BCC, Visionaries came flooding out all at once, running around the stage, mugging for the crowd, climbing out onto the riser in the middle of the photo pit and just generally raising hell. Far closer to party rap than Boot Camp, the LA natives enjoyed a substantial hometown crowd and played the show like an extension of some monster house party. Their DJ showed off his sick scratching skills, freestyle flows yielded snaps like “you don't need an ice dentist/you just need to put together a nice sentence,” which ended up being probably the only quasi-negative thing out of the groups' collective mouths. The back and forth with the crowds, the call-outs, and the ever ubiquitous “throw your hands in the air/and wave 'em like you just don't care” (or some variation of it—multiple times from multiple acts makes the statement run together in my mind) had these guys—who were pretty much the United Nations of hip-hop—holding the crowd in the palm of their hands. Visionaries' forty-minute set flew by, with “I Love Hip-Hop” and “Come One, Come All” eliciting screams from the crowd, and closed by asking the crowd to throw up a peace sign, the first of many during the night.
Read 2008 Paid Dues Part II Hieroglyphics, Living Legends and Jedi Mind Tricks
For more information:
Kool Keith
Boot Camp Clik
Visionaries
Download – Visionaries – "Crop Circles" – [mp3]
