20/02/2008
Friends & Family
Cargo
16 February 2008
A hip hop writer once told me a story. He was in New York City and making the obligatory trip to Fat Beats. While approaching that 6th Avenue mecca, he saw someone rapping outside the shop. A man with a veteran swagger propped up by a bag of records and a whole lot of attitude. It was Percee P. They chatted. My friend said how inspirational it felt to be face to face with hip hop – politicking with an emcee who put out his first record in 1988 and has hustled ever since, consistently raising his game and becoming a cornerstone of the underground.
Percee P’s still at it – his show at London’s Cargo peppered with tunes off his ‘Perseverance’ album – the title, he tells us, is just what he’s had to subscribe to. But on this particular evening, hip hop’s brave new world takes the stage too – another emcee who has guested on so many records and has his own, ‘Ode to the Guetto,’ coming out very soon. It’s Guilty Simpson, that Detroit stalwart who had the honour of working with the now-legendary Jay Dilla and is creating a sizeable buzz on the street.
His mic tactics are aggressive. He drops lyrics steeped in the grit of the city he’s grown up in, cushioned by that deliciously off-kilter production Detroit’s become renowned for. It’s a deep set – head nodding is deliberate, brows are furrowed. DJ House Shoes cues up beats that take you further into a blue-collar world, where the quest of success is a hard one, and explains the paucity of Simpson’s flow. He doesn’t have time to waste.
And while he’s doing his thing, Percee’s doing his – walking through the nodding heads and selling his CDs, chatting to the punters and continuing that guerrilla distribution campaign that’s taken him from the pavement outside Fat Beats Records to London’s Cargo.
It’s with a sigh of relief that these emcees bless the venue with such prowess – they cut through all of the jiggy commercial hip hop that pounds the airwaves and prove that, yes, hip hop’s got life in it yet.
WORDS: Helene Dancer - PHOTOGRAPHY: Ben Harris
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