Life in a Van Part 2
(The Shotgun Wedding Quintet plays for the kids)
I hadn't played at the Phoenix Theatre for probably five or six years and there I found myself on a Monday on the third night of a nation wide tour. I went out front and there were kids puffing on cigarettes that looked like they had just been born: fetuses committing self made abortions with Marlboro menthol, woah(that's a bit much). It was an odd thing to see kids smoking that hadn't been alive when Ice Cube put out Death Certificate. We've been playing for the bar crowd for years, the mid twenties to forties and suddenly we're on stage playing classic hip-hop breaks for kids who think Eminem is old-school.
By Sacramento I was over it but don't mean I was like "f**k these new jacks, they don't know Pete Rock from Pete Seeger" I mean that I was over the stigma and was really enjoying playing for these young people. They are open. They love hip-hop. They don't necessarily understand what The Shotgun Quintet is all about or the context when we first come out but by the end of the first song they have their hands up in the air and they're down for what we're doing.
In Sacramento they had the room split in half with a plastic wall that went down the middle and cut right into the stage. The 21 crowd was on the left and the minors on the right of the plastic. It was really strange because you have to go from the left to the right, rapping to one side of the wall and then turning to the other side and rapping. It was like playing a show at the borders of Berlin circa nineteen eighty five.
When we started playing our first couple hits the drinking crowd hid out in the darkness while the kids came right up front while we began to bang away and sweat off the bandstand. At the end of the set the 21 crowd had crept up and filled the space on their side of the wall as well, following the example of their juniors. At the end of the set a girl that must have been in middle school came up and told me how much she liked my lyrics. It was very sweet of her and heart felt and it made the hunger and the fact I hadn't slept in 32 hours take a back seat and reminded me why we were there.
Time passes and you forget what it was like to be a kid from a small town and be completely obsessed with hip-hop. Then you go to a town like Missoula Montana and you meet these kids that drove three hours south to see Zion I and the Grouch and you see yourself in the enthusiasm that exudes from their faces when they talk about beats and raps and it feels like you're coming home. One kid told me how he was working on writing a lot but wasn't quite ready to perform on stage yet. He said he would be around the Bay Area in a few months and hoped to come and see us then. I asked what the reason was for his visit and he said his older brother was locked up for meth out there. He was a good a kid, trying to live and he loved hip-hop. This thing brings people together, all races, sexes, financial levels, and generations. It's a beautiful thing.
-Dublin 03-30-11
