Jambalaya Festival Bayou Music Center May 23, 2013
Ingredients:
- Houston, Texas
- A roomful of screaming, dancing teens
- G-Eazy, RL Grime, Big Boi, Zeds Dead, Earlwolf
Instructions:
1. Open the doors of Bayou Music Center at approximately 4 p.m. Allow scores of teenage hip-hop enthusiasts to swarm the floor, courtesy of Scoremore, the young company responsible for bringing today's best underground and indie artists to Southern states.
2. Preheat your Jambalaya Festival with a heaping helping of G-Eazy, a hilariously foul-mouthed rapper from Oakland, California. Eazy, legally known as Gerald Earl Gillum, is lithe and pale, with what appears to be a pompadour greased back with gel and a comb. When his mouth opens to perform cuts like "Lady Killers" and "Loaded," -- two stand-out tracks in a short discography of songs that repeatedly discuss sex and drugs -- he sounds like a splice between Lil Wayne and Drake -- only his verses are ten times dirtier. Don't be shocked when you see a woman throw her panties onto the stage.
3. Follow G-Eazy with an hour's worth of RL Grime, a DJ who fuses EDM with hip-hop. Be careful not to go over the allotted time limit, however. What starts off as an arousing reinterpretation of currently popular rap songs into dubstep waves becomes, after prolonged exposure, groups of teenagers sitting down in pockets inside Bayou Music Center, tired from dancing to the digital beats.
4. Sprinkle in about 45 minutes of rapper Big Boi. Use caution with the use of images on the LCD screen behind him, which shows images of him and former Outkast partner Andre 3000 in stages of hip-hop ascension. Your audience will soon become so nostalgically transfixed by the litany of videos above, they will nearly forget the actual man performing onstage.
Since the duo was known for their colorful and creative videos, the entire performance will start to feel like a music video with live music attached, even as Big Boi sends you on a trip down memory lane with his personal bests from a decade of being one of rap's wittiest and politically astute lyricists. He will smartly wedge a few new songs into his set, to which the audience will nod appreciatively, but when classics like "Rosa Parks" and "Ms. Jackson" roll back around, the bouncing crowd will show their true colors, rapping along in remembrance.
