Ostensibly billed as a “festival”, Lucerna Music Bar’s “Street Beat Groove Festival” featured American hip-hop legends De la Soul as the headlining act. Also slated to appear, according to the plethora of posters adorning every street lamp and building wall in Prague, were the American hip-hop act Ohmega Watts, France’s La Cédille and Glasgow’s Da Blingz. Actually appearing were the first three, the last getting lost somewhere between Glasgow and Prague, I suppose.
The concert started off with La Cédille, a full band hip-hop group. Composed of eight members, the group tried to get a groove going and by the end had hit its stride, but that’s not saying too much.
The second group, actually artist, was Ohmega Watts, hailing from Portland, Oregon. Along for the ride were Florida’s Surreal and another MC of whom I regrettably never caught the name. I say regrettably because the third MC was a fireball, full of energy and surely a Beastie Boy who got lost on the way to the studio. The French grouped seemed decent until this collective put them to shame.
At the top of the bill and hitting the stage at the ripe hour of 11:40 p.m., De la Soul came out with a bang. This group, whose recent album The Grind Date was ignored by the mainstream but which nevertheless serves to educate the radio-play artists what real hip-hop is, had the energy and style to make an otherwise slow crowd get moving.
Admittedly, I am not terribly familiar with De la’s work outside of their first (3 Feet High and Rising) and last (the aforementioned Grind Date) albums and a few scattered singles, but my lack of depth was not important as the sheer radiance of the group infected the crowd.
With Posdnuos and Dave (Trugoy the Dove) taking the front of the stage, Maseo (Pasemaster Mase) manned the tables in the rear for much of the trios hour-plus set. Maseo came out first and started spinning for about 10 minutes before the other joined him – starting with call-and-response DJing, paying particular homage to A Tribe Called Quest. Once the full group was onstage, the ball really started rolling.
Playing the crowd as only master MCs know how, De la had people waving their hands and screaming back within minutes. Unfortunately, the energy of the crowd didn’t quite live up to their expectations, I feel. This became especially evident when the group declined to come out for an encore, since the crowd wasn’t really clamoring for it anyway. The crowd’s low energy and ADD arm-waves (they didn’t last very long) nevertheless did not stop De la from putting on a manic and intense show.
They also mixed their playlist between albums very well. Instead of focusing almost exclusively on The Grind Date, they instead included songs from across their catalogue in their medleys. Of particular note, they got “Potholes in My Lawn” out quite early and instead of saving their most famous song (“Me, Myself and I”) for their encore, they stuck it in the middle of their third medley. All three seemed to be having a good time, with smiles and laughter abundant. Their charisma, either individually or as a chemical combination, is simply so thick, it’s hard to criticize them.
At one point, during “Rock Co.Kane Flow”, they played the songs breakdown to the hilt. The point at which the song stops briefly on the album became a minute or two, each time. The trio would freeze in place and the crowd would scream their heads off until they started moving again. It was a fantastic moment of theatricality that only served to highlight their talent at working the crowd into a fever.
Their final song involved pulling almost every woman in the pit onto the stage, making it a mess of writhing bodies all bouncing in time to their raps and beats. The group left the stage to the tune of Gorillaz’ “Feel Good, Inc.”, to which they had contributed.
Alas, the crowd I think never quite lived up to their expectations, as they felt the encore calls were sufficiently lacking – and they were. The group declined an encore and the Gorillaz album was cut in favor of the house music. The lights came up and so ended one of the best concerts of my admittedly lacking concert-going life.
The only problems I had with this concert were the quite late start time and the lackluster, in hindsight, opening group.
GRADE: A-