Brian Slattery Photos
Wednesday night marked the first night of a new monthly hip hop show hosted by rapper and producer Chef the Chef. It was called the Cold Quest Underground Music Showcase, and Chef had come with merch to spread the word. “Please grab some free stickers and put them in places you shouldn’t put them,” he said.
Chef’s sense of mischief and fun pervaded the entire evening — as did his deep and obvious love of hip hop. As he himself said before the first act took the stage at Stella Blues on Crown Street, “Bow your heads. Thank you, gods of hip hop, for being with us today.”
First up was Sketch Tha Cataclysm, gamely warming up the room with his own brand of self-aware, hard-hitting hip hop. Sketch used all of the Stella Blues stage to deliver his message and some of the floor as well, prowling like a caged tiger when he wasn’t spitting rhymes. And he’d taken off his shoes to do it.
“Nice socks!” someone yelled from the audience.
“They match the shirt, sir,” Sketch said, then dove into another song. He finished his last song by fading out the music behind him and doing the last bars a cappella. His voice was all he needed to carry the rhythm.
Next up was Detta!, who came onstage first to say that maybe she wasn’t up for performing. “It’s about to be comedy and rap,” she joked. That turned out to be a ruse. As soon as the beat started, she snapped into focus, spitting out bars that felt truthfully tough and even heckling Chef a little. She brought out the phones in the audience as people sought to capture her on stage.
“Tip your bartender,” she said, lacing it with expletives, “and I mean that in the politest possible way.” She pointed to the bartender in the back of the room, “I work for tips, too, so I got you, girl.”
Chef was clearly delighted with how things were going. “Detta!, you’re my favorite rapper,” he said, “except for me and Dr. Seuss.”
Reggie Blu was all coiled energy on the microphone as he jumped forward and back, twisting fingers in the air to accompany the intricacies of his rhymes. “Come in close,” he said, “I want to make you family.” The audience obliged, taking a few steps toward the stage to hear Blu talk about his struggles and his ambitions, the hard work he was doing to get to where he wanted to be. But there was humor in it, too.
“I’m on Deezer,” he said, referring to the French music streaming service. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m on it.”
Chef used the end of Blu’s set to remind the audience about the swag he’d brought. “If there are any stickers on that table at the end of the night,” he said, “I’m going to call the police.”
The humor of the evening perhaps reached its peak with the pairing of James Joyce and White Cheddar, who started with a song about how they were big scumbags, proceeded to a song about jerks on social media, and moved to a song devoted to that one guy in the audience at every show who smells really bad. By the end of their set, Joyce said he was sweating enough that he might become that bad-smelling guy for the final set, and called it a day. Chef ushered them offstage by calling them “two of my favorite earthlings.”
There was one more act to go, he reminded the audience. “Leave me if you want to,” he said.
“But I don’t want to!” someone in the audience said.
Chef introduced Creepa Gang, the final act of the evening, by suggesting that all the previous bands had maybe been a little chill (which, of course, wasn’t true). Having stated his joking premise, he said Creepa Gang were going to change all that.
Creepa Gang were a duo of Smitty and Willz, and as Willz explained, the band’s name was an acronym for “creating reasonable efforts enticing people anywhere; gaining attention nonstop globally.” This message of positivity burst out of them from their very first song, from the words about making things happen to the bouncy delivery. And it was, in a way, as Chef promised. The second song brought the energy even higher. Even if it was late in the evening, the party just kept going.
