 | Visualize Vivid Verbplay in my Vortex
Current mood:  high That's right, that's everyone's funkiest homosapien, Mr. Del. Last night, Alan, Derek, Victor, Sutton and myself had the pleasure of visiting the Fillmore to see the most legendary of the Hiero crew come to spit.
Evening starts when we pick up Sutton and his bag of goodies way up on Market. Cruise to Vic's place where I can tell it's gonna be an early night...he's already on the couch two blunts deep, lights dimmed, watching some history channel bullshit. We get him to raise the lights (ruining the romance for him), turn on some music and I find a basketball game on tv.
Sutton realizes he still doesn't have a ticket, so we pile out and head to the show, at which point I finish the 40 I was working on. Mickey's does me in once more. We get to the show and Sutton gets his ticket right there, no sell out crowd here. Which is actually disappointing, because as we go inside to the sounds of Motion Man (think Pablito's Way) the place is pretty empty and the crowd is almost all white. Definitely not what I was expecting.
Motion Man finishes up and out comes some chick I hadn't heard of before...Song 1. She's dope. Real fast over the beats, coherent, solid. She gives way to Mike Realm who rips off a fantastic set on the 1s and 2s, using the same video scratching technique employed by Cut Chemist (see my blog "When Chemistry Cuts" for a description), using clips from various movies including the "O Face" scene from Office Space.
And then comes the man. Decked out in a pair of tie up slipper type shoes, white pants, a light lime green polo shirt and a sick fedora style hat that's a white base with spiraling lines of black, green and white. Very sick. He comes out much less inebriated than I had anticipated. In fact, I'd almost say at this point in the evening that he's actually the closest to sober that I've ever seen him. Don't get me wrong, this changes throughout the course of the show, but for an opening song, I hadn't seen him that lucid in a bit.
He comes out and rips a set. It's got solid freestyles throughout, and some old and new favorites. He starts it off with the perennial classic At the Helm off Third Eye Vision. When this ends he goes straight into the Virus cut off the Deltron cd which he parlays into the heavy violin sound of my all time favorite Del song, Catch a Bad One.
But the hits don't stop there. Phoney Franchise is next, and at this point, the blunts and Heinekens have come out and I start to get the feeling that our time left with Mr. Sapien is dwindling with every puff or sip. Powers That Be comes next (with A Plus backing him) and then they go into the Souls song Make Your Mind Up which they follow with a new APlus song off his new album.
At this point, Del goes into the usual selling of product by announcing the his new album (long awaited, I might add) is dropping soon and will be called 11th Hour. Now, the last two times I've seen Hiero, he's been talking about this same album, so I have to assume a) not only will it be out soonish, but b) if Del's taking this long to work on it, it oughta be pretty fucking hot.
Then they play a few I hadn't heard before, We are the Funky Homo Sapiens, and some song called Thank You bookend the popular Mr. Dobalina. At this point, we're into the encore part of the show, and Del's really letting loose on the freestyles, my guess is because he's tossed. His hat comes down lower over his eyes, his cadence quicker and a bit more slurred, and he's paying less attention to moving the show along and more to spitting. He freestyles over the beat from Dead Prez's Bigger Than Hip Hop and then goes into another new song called Foot Down. He flows one more time before breaking out my Dad's favorite, If You Must. Personally, I hate that song. Anyone who has breath so bad it melts ice cream is not something I want to hear about.
Finally, he closes out the set with a bang. You Never Knew and the Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood. Fucking sick. We get another half hour of show after that, but it's just the DJ and Del partying with the audience...at that point, he's trashed and done rapping.
But, he was and continues to be, Del the Funky Homosapien. |
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