Picture a middle-aged white woman in a crowd of under-21-year-olds at a hip-hop show at Toad’s Place. She was raised on the music of Neil Young, Journey, and the Bee Gees; her knowledge of modern hip-hop might fit into the groove of a record album. At 12:30 a.m. on a weeknight, instead of home in bed with a cup of Sleepytime, she’s standing on her chair, pumping one arm in the air, screaming “Hell yeah!” and “rhythm sticks!” in response to the call of the emcee on the stage.
She may have been old enough to have given birth to the kids dancing around her, but she was, in truth, just about the same vintage as the two front men of Blackalicious, the alt-hip-hop duo behind the beats Thursday night at Toad’s Place.
Blackalicious is a two-man tremor that has been shaking the hip-hop underground since 1995. Underground is where they started and where they remain to this day — in the realm of true talent, hidden from the spotlights of mainstream rap. Influenced by such venerable predecessors as Parliament Funkadelic, NWA, Tribe Called Quest, and Public Enemy, Blackalicious consistently puts out some of the most creative, positive-voiced and ingeniously syncopated hip hop around.
Out of Oakland, California, Xavier “Chief Xcel” Mosley and emcee Tim “Gift of Gab” Parker have been producing high-brow hip-hop since the era of Sugar Hill. With four albums behind them, they’ve reached what many say is the top of their form with the newly released CD, “The Craft.” Their website claims the work to stand alongside that of Sly Stone, Outkast, and The Roots. The artists themselves, who in interviews come off as witty and self-effacing, call it merely a work of “complex simplicity.”
Simplicity in message and complexity in medium are two of Blackalicious’ trademarks, fueled by an intelligence and wisdom that have guided them through nearly twenty years in the business. It has also sent them skipping across genres and into collaborations with artists from Gil-Scott Heron to Ben Harper, and garnered an audience as disparate as the Blackalicious aesthetic itself.
Last night the middle-aged duo, backed by a handsome couple of young back-up vocalists, carried the rapturous crowd for two hours with favorites from Blazing Arrow and other albums, performing the requisite call and response guaranteed to whip up an audience. (“Can I freestyle?” Gab yelled in query to the crowd, twice, before breaking into an expertly delivered, fast-forward scat-rap using the key words “New Haven.”)
Although Blackalicious delivers a lively show, truly getting their groove requires a pair of good headphones and full attention to Gab’s acrobatic syllabics atop Xcel’s malleable rhythms and inventive samples. There is also poetry amid the rap, (if rap is not already poetry), exemplified in such works as the beautiful, three-poet opus, “Release:”
These words are not tools of communication.
They are shards of metal Dropped from eight story windows…
And there isn’t a word or phrase to be caught
A verse to be recited
A man to de-fill my being in those moments
I am blankness, the contained center of an “O”
The pyramidic containment of an “A”
I stand in the middle of all that I have learned
All that I have memorized
All that I’ve known by heart
Unable to reach any of it
Far above the predictable, bombastic rants of commercial radio’s hip-hop princes, Blackalicous’s word-beats are layered in multidimensions of assonance and rhythm, resulting in the most intelligent hip-hop around, hip-hop for which even old-schoolers will stay up late on a weeknight.
