SOHH NYC

Last Thursday night in the cramped quarters of the Nokia Theater in Times Square, an unlikely lineup of underground hip hop favorites and golden era legends took the stage to bless New York with a dose of good old fashioned, unadulterated, live hip hop. Although the lineup read more like a playlist on some rap nerd's ipod than something a promoter would actually be able to put together, each of the acts stepped up and delivered exactly what their respective fans were looking for.

There was MF Doom,  Big Daddy Kane, Little Brother, and Pete Rock, with Jin and Spec Boogie thrown in for good measure.

First up, the masked one. MF Doom is a special kind of artist. He has a fiercely loyal fanbase that can recite his intricately constructed verses line for line without missing a beat. He has arguably more recorded material than any other rapper alive today and enough aliases to rival the late Mac Dre.

If you can appreciate it, Doom's live show is really something to behold. He sulks around the stage in his gleaming iron mask, giving off the same spooky vibe that bleeds through on his records, the whole time rattling off his lyrics like some kind of genius mental patient.

I can honestly say that I had no idea what to expect from a live MF Doom performance because  his stuff is alot to handle while you're sitting in a quiet place with headphones on. What you have to understand going in is, Doom is Doom. You have to accept him for what he does and he does it pretty well.

In a strange twist, this week the masked villain found himself on the receiving end of a viciously personal dis track from long time friend and collaborator MF Grimm. Although the two have had their differences in the past, the dis caught fans off guard, since any past beef was believed to have been squashed.

On the track, entitled Book of Daniel, Grimm's attacks goes at Doom with weird lines like "We've been through so much, Zev you was close to me/used to come through your house, buy your ass groceries". Beef can be fun, especially when it's between two artists who were cool at one point, but this seems to me like a problem they could have worked out behind closed doors rather than in the court of public opinion.

Now, I can't speak for anybody else who was there, but I didn't have to wait until the end of the night to know Big Daddy Kane would stand out as the highlight of the show. When Kane took the stage the crowd roared it's approval and those of us old enough to remember his glory days completely lost our minds like we'd just witnessed the second coming of Tupac or something!

These old school dudes are cut from a whole different cloth than what is used nowadays to mass produce our current crop of dime a dozen rappers and after they've been on stage for about 30 seconds you realize that you're about to witness something special. Kane ran through all of this classics and demonstrated his mind control abilities over his fans by commanding us to lean right, then left, throw our hands in the air and join him in a fallen rapper tribute that if tried by any other performer that night would have been met with blank stares. A special treat was a rapid fire freestyle over the "What's Your Fantasy" beat that would have put a Hawaiian Sophie era Jay-Z to shame.

The Legendary Pete Rock set just the right tone with a DJ set featuring most of his own classics as well as a whole range of 90's era staples. With the sweet aroma of purple haze wafting through the building, openers like Spec Boogie and Jin accepted their assignments and warmed the finicky crowd up in preparation for the real show stealers. Little Brother's The Minstrel Show has been called everything from the best album of 2005 to the most overrated album of the last 5 years, but I'll be damned if anybody claims those boys can't rock a crowd. Phonte and Pooh manhandled the mic and threw themselves into their set, crisscrossing the stage and bellowing their verses like true live performance vets. For whatever reason 9th Wonder chose not to join them behind the turntables, which would have been nice, but his partners held it down and did just fine without him. Incidentally, 9th will be performing a set by himself tonight at SOBS.

All in all, one of the best live performances I've seen in my life, hands down.