Talent

Had a very enjoyable weekend visit from my youngest brother, and we were witness to the work of some very talented artístes. Friday night, we went to the Gift of Gab/Lateef the Truth Speaker show. As I've mentioned before, they're the two MCs from Blackalicious, who create much more intelligent hip-hop than the average crap you see on MTV. Blackalicious is to 50 Cent what Radiohead is to Matchbox 20, so the whole show was dedicated to opening people's minds to the music, not about who had more gold chains and bigger guns. The opener was a local crew known as Twilight Sentinels. Their beats were a little raw, but they had a good flow and were high energy enough to get the crowd going. They were followed by DJ Mike Relm, who did things with the turntables that I've never heard before. He was completely sick. He spun for about 20 minutes, whipped the crowd into a frenzy, and then brought out Gift of Gab, Lateef, and a second DJ. Relm stayed on stage, and the group proceeded to bring the house down. On the Blackalicious records, Lateef usually plays a secondary role and Gift takes the primary raps, but on stage, Lateef was in his element. His style is similar to Eminem in terms of the rhythms he rhymes with, but lyrically, there's none of the clownish rhyming that Eminem gets into. Just straight venom. Lateef took lead on about two out of every three songs, and Gift of Gab chimed in on every third song or so. I haven't been at a show where the crowd was that into every song in a long time. It was one of those concerts where I got so lost in what was going on onstage that none of the typical stuff that I hate about concerts (people standing too close to me, pushing past to get closer to the stage, blowing smoke in my face) was even an issue. It was all about the music.

Saturday night, we saw Sin City. Plenty has been written about this movie (Rotten Tomatoes has gathered a lot of the reviews in one place), so I won't rehash. I will only say, it's worth seeing. It's extremely violent (a side effect of being completely faithful to the graphic novels), and you may not like it, but I walked out of there blown away by the vision that went into the making of that film. Visually, it was one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. As my brother said, "Every comic book movie from now on should look like that, because it was like watching a moving comic." While I think there's still a place for something like the Spider-Man or X-Men movies, I agree that I hope Sin City will be influential on Hollywood's visual style for a long time to come.

As an aside, in a further example of Hollywood's hypocrisy, this was one of the most incredibly violent movies I've seen in my entire life. Guys getting shot in the crotch, people being tortured, hung, decapitated, having their limbs hacked off, even someone being eaten alive by a wolf. Yet to get it released without an NC-17 rating, they had to tone down... the nudity. Yeah. Another victory for the moral majority.