Day 42: "Music for the Mature B-Boy" - DJ Format (2003)
Yes, I took another couple of days off. My current job has spikes of intense insanity in terms of workload and we're right slap bang in the middle of one of those. On top of that, I've also been working on organising the annual charity Netrunner tournament I run each year, and arranging a trip to America in November to play in the Netrunner World Championships, and arranging my partners 40th Birthday Party, also in November. So, if service is a little spotty for the next week or so, I'll crave your indulgence.
So let's talk about something fun - the joy and sorrow of the support act.
listen to me here
I have a mixed history with support acts at gigs. It always seems such a thankless job acting as the support; maybe only 10% of the crowd is there to see you (if you're lucky), the stage setup and sound board are all mixed ready for a band that probably doesn't sound exactly like you, and pouring your heart and soul out for a bunch of people who are going to talk over you while they drink overpriced beer has to be a miserable and crushing experience. And it can be an equally spotty experience for the audience as well - sometimes support acts can be niche and very difficult to appreciate in a live setting; I saw weird math rock band Dillinger Escape Plan as a support act once, having never heard anything of theirs before and it was nearly unendurably bad. I saw Finley Quaye supporting the Fun Lovin' Criminals and he was so obviously bored and had no desire to be there that it made the entire night a complete bummer.
In 2003 I had just moved out of Dave's place and was blissfully co-habiting with the Girl Who Broke My Heart. I'd been working for Sheffield University for a couple of years by that point, and while what I had hoped was going to be my career quickly bogged down into a morass of paperwork and politics which left me feeling completely burned out, working for the University (and being so close to the University Students Union buildings) gave me an excellent 'in' to seeing a lot of bands I liked. One of the best parts of my job was checking the internal postings for acts I enjoyed playing the Octagon and Foundry and sniping tickets for them by walking 150 yards down the road on my lunch break to the box office.
It was March or April of that year, pre-Summer break and pre-Exams for sure, that Jurassic 5 came to the Octagon. For those of you not familiar, Sheffield Octagon is a pretty decently large venue for a students union; its the kind of place you play when you are still touring universities but you're way to big to play in the tiny stages in Students Union bars and the like. I've seen probably twenty plus gigs at the Octagon in my time, and it remains one of my favourite venues, even though the bands which play there now I'm far too out of touch with to even know what kind of music they play, let alone be a fan of their work.
I was psyched to see Jurassic 5 live; Dave had played "J5" and "Quality Control" pretty regularly when we'd lived together, and I'd become a fan through osmosis. By 2003 I was thrilled by the prospect of getting to see them live because I hadn't really ever been to a hip-hip show before. I'd seen The Beastie Boys and Eminem and Snoop at festivals, but this was going to be the first time I'd be specifically going to see a hip-hop act on their own. The Girl was not so keen on the West Coast Urban Flavour so, as I had done a few times before, I left the car at home that morning and took the train into Sheffield with a change of clothes in my bag. When work was done for the day, I went to the pub which used to be called the West End and drank with some of the postgrads I knew, and then when the Octagon opened its doors, I rolled in.
The audience was, as I could have guessed, mainly a sea of white faces; Sheffield may be pretty left wing and right on, but its still an industrial northern town and its demographics are fairly stereotypical. What I wasn't expecting were the two white guys who took to the stage as the support act.
Now, as an aside, there's probably a decent discussion to be had about cultural appropriation here. Even before it was a thing, I always felt slightly uncomfortable about the idea of 'white rappers'; Vanilla Ice obviously didn't do much to dispel the notion that white guys were terrible rappers and only in it to cash in, but it was more the principal of people trying to take something from black culture and capitalise on it and make it safe for white audiences. Over the years, my position has softened slightly but only because I've seen people come and go in the world of rap and hip hop, and the white guys who do it and are successful do so because they can hang, and they have the respect of other people in the rap community regardless of the colour of their skin.
With that in mind, when a British DJ from Southampton took to the stage with his white, Jewish Canadian MC, I was not prepared to be blown away. But make no mistake, these boys can HANG. Abdominal, the mouthpiece on a lot of the DJ Format tracks, is the fastest, cleanest rapper I've ever seen live and the crowd were crazy from the moment their set started. What I had missed in the run up to this gig was DJ Format releasing a song with Akil and Charlie 2na from Jurassic 5 on vocals, so when they came out to finish the support slot with "We Know Something" everyone in the venue lost their minds.
The following morning, The Girl asked me before I went to work why I had texted her at 9.45pm with a text that just said "DJ Format". I'd intended to just make a note for myself, but the reminder was all I needed to spend the following lunch break heading into Sheffield centre to go buy this album.
If you ever wanted a good, low pressure primer to see if you might enjoy hip-hop, this might be the album I would recommend. At only 45 minutes total it doesn't outstay its welcome, but it also means that every track on here is a banger. On top of that, and ticking even more of the boxes of "Things Rich really likes", this album features not one, not two, but three exceptionally good music videos for the songs from it. The videos for both "We Know Something" and "The Hit Song" are pretty great, but if I can assign you some homework, you really, really should watch this video, done in one single continuous shot.
The sad coda to this is that while I was looking for links for this article I discovered that not only are Format and Abdominal touring together again, I just missed them playing in Sheffield at the O2. However, I also discovered that Abdominal had given a really interesting TED talk about writing a rap song with his mother, which I will also link here because I spent 20 minutes watching this at lunchtime instead of doing anything else productive.
