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Friday, April 29, 2005

13 mics and Style 4 Free

Hashimoto Oaf-o passed on the info from CBC Radio (which I am rapidly warming to)

The following is courtesy of the Toronto Star via BugMeNot (which if you use, you should all be contributing to or you're a jerkwad.) NOW also has a good review here. Google results here.

Jaysay: Performace tonight and closing tomorrow, so be quick if you're interested. Telephone ordering is recommended. The fast and patient agent hooked us up with some nice seats and dealt with my craptastic background noise, as I was ordering tickets walking down a street full of honking cars, and hardly knew the title of the event. 10 points dude



13 mics and Style 4 Free

Written and performed by Benji Reid.
At the Harbourfront Centre Theatre until April 30.
416-973-4000.

"Yo Toronto! This is not sit-down-and-watch theatre. This is hip-hop theatre," announces Benji Reid. "Please make some noise." Hip-hop theatre it is, and to put it in his own Manchester idiom, it goes down a treat.
With the proclamation, "Hip hop is dead," the lithe and multi-talented Reid, backed by bassist Steve Ojay, drummer Simon Moore and turntablist Master Wong, launches 13 mics. Dancing around a forest of microphones, Reid gives a politicized history of hip hop, wandering back through blues, jazz and spirituals and forward to a scathing critique of U.S. hip hop.
Taking swipes at Eminem and P.Diddy as he raps through the last couple of decades, Reid accuses Sony and EMI of de facto racism. If they could, he suggests, the music industry would remix the words of Martin Luther King to sell Coca Cola.
"Hip hop's voice has not been lost," he insists. "It has been silenced." Preoccupied with drugs, violence and hatred, hip hop, says Reid, needs to be revived as the "universal language spoken in every ghetto."
Reid is "body-popping" as he moves from mic to mic, layering his message, taking on new characters, including a white British hip-hop artist. He moves like a four-armed octopus, or a wire-built figure manipulated by unseen hands. He does a funky step; he does a bad break dance; he makes like a gangsta rapper, desperately clutching his crotch.
For the improv session that follows, Style 4 Free, Reid reveals his mastery of the stage. He works up a little number on the proffered word "linoleum," does some passable ballet steps and shivers into a robotic routine, free-associating through his head mic.
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