I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this tour. Four of the original architects of The Pharcyde’s debut record, performing the entire album live onstage, twenty years later. I was trying to keep my expectations tempered with a healthy degree of skepticism, but the idea of hearing one of my all-time favorite albums performed live sounded amazing.
And the moment the show began, my last few reservations evaporated. The preshow music was silenced, J-Swift sat down at a keyboard on the right side of the stage, L.A. Jay stepped behind the turntables, and the familiar strains of Bizarre Ride’s instrumental intro started, a swinging near-minute of laid-back shuffling jazz. The audience snapped to attention, heads began to nod to the rhythm. And then, the beat for “Oh Shit” dropped, and the world exploded. Cartoons began to speed across a projection screen, the room was bathed in bright colored light, and the MCs appeared out of the crowd, rapping verses of comical calamity, shouting to be heard, spinning and jumping and reveling in the moment.
From there, it was up, up, and away, the rapid-fire manic insanity of the album’s tracklist eliciting rapturous reaction from the spectators. It was clear just how much fun the performers were having; Fatlip eliciting giggles from his bandmates as he delivered verses, Slim Kid Tre doing moves that looked half like crazy b-boy uprocking and half like russian folk dances, everyone hopping around and making faces and cracking each other up. “Soul Flower” was a whirlwind of call-and-response, “Ya Mama” was fittingly off-the-cuff and hilarious (with K-Natural and Fatlip’s zingers drawing screams from the crowd), “Passing Me By” had everyone shouting along, “Otha Fish” showcased Tre’s inimitable melodic flow. Each tune built on the ones before, the tempo rising and falling, the running order a masterpiece of musical dynamics.
Eventually, the final notes of the album faded into rapturous applause. The group took a few minutes, returned to the stage to encore with a couple more classics, and then a guy in the audience yelled out a desperate request for a song he’d missed by showing up late – so they pulled him up onstage for a triumphant reprise of “Passing Me By”. If you need a reminder of how much fun Hip-Hop can be, this was exactly the ticket – a roller-coaster of beats, rhymes, and undiluted oddball entertainment.
Photos © 2013 Marnie Ann Joyce. Additional photos from this event can be seen here.