Weed: Necessary In Rap Shows?

Last night I had the pleasure of spinning for the New York stop of the Smoker’s Club tour. The show was typical of many rappity-rap rap shows today: nearly devoid of women (and totally devoid of attractive women), the audience of backpack-clad men bob their heads were too cool to do anything more than furiously bob their heads [||] to rap music from the past, the present and the Internets, only to squeal like marijuana-laden school girls once the man of the hour, Curren$y, took the stage.

Once erstwhile record label big wig Dame Dash popped up, the scene quickly resembled something like an urban Justin Beiber concert, and a large glop of Stanleys decided it’d be best to bumrush the tiny DJ booth I’d been occupying, easily violating all safety hazard codes for the area.

To get next to Dame Dash? Really? This isn’t 2005, and Dame isn’t going to put you on as his “Ultimate Hustler” apprentice. But I’m straying from the point.

The one saving grace was the overabundance of weed being passed around freely like flu shots in college, so much so that the fog machine in the venue couldn’t hide or mask both the smoke and aroma. Eventually the entire place was sponsored by the makes of kush, purple haze and chronic, and it seemed that all was well in the world… until I woke up the next morning and realized I ate a half a bag of chips and an entire hero sandwich and drank almost entire bottles of pink lemonade and Chardonnay the night prior.

Good times.

Needless to say, I don’t think I would have gotten through that show if it weren’t for weed’s influence. In my advancing age and declining sanity, I’ve all but lost the tolerance and patience for most rap shows that doesn’t involve The Roots, as it seems that most of rap’s too-cool-for-school concert goers don’t do anything outside of nodding their skulls in approval to the act on stage screaming obscenity-laced tirades right back at them, forgetting that at a time it was once all right to jump around like a child on a sugar rush during recess while said act was screaming said tirade.

So now we’ve taken to legally (well, legally in California and other parts of the country, that is) medicating ourselves with the finest of drugs our middling paychecks can buy to fully appreciate one of the oldest forms of hip hop culture, substituting dance moves for straight-faced hand waving, trading in the ethereal experience of the live performance for a Flip Cam recap found on your closest YouTube page. While it’s likely that people won’t dance no’ mo’, at least I can count on the free drug paraphernalia to get by.