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Monday, August 1, 2005
Anger Management Tour
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rappers are notorious movie buffs, and it’s common for rap records to unfold as well-paced, cinematic narratives. In concert, however, hip-hop very often loses the plot. Artists tend to play abbreviated versions of their songs, murdering the groove. The volume is extreme. The lyrics are unintelligible. The transitions are terrible. The fan interaction is a command performance, with rappers shouting instructions, demanding near-constant displays of maximum crunkness. The music feels less like drama and more like pornography.
Such was the case Sunday night at HiFi Buys Amphitheatre, where the Atlanta scream machine Lil Jon, the New York gangsta rapper 50 Cent and the scatological Detroit genius Eminem performed at the traveling show known as the Anger Management Tour.
Although each artist tried to vary his set with at least one halfhearted soft song — Jon performed “Lovers & Friends,” 50 asked “21 Questions” and Em played “Stan” — the overall impression was that the men wanted to stay hard-core, the better to maintain the invincible image so easy to cultivate on CD (and so hard to maintain in person).
Jon’s set was the earliest of the three, and by early we mean early — this reviewer arrived at 7:15, 15 minutes after the announced start time, and was shocked to find hip-hop’s quintessential creature of the night already stomping around the stage, during daylight hours no less. (Punctuality is seldom heralded as one of the music’s virtues.) Wearing shades and baggy clothes, he performed on an elaborate set decorated with a giant movable sculpture of himself. (The hair swung, the arms moved, the mouth looked like a jewelry store.)
To be fair, you don’t want Lil Jon singing slow jams any more than you want Ozzy Osbourne crooning “Wind Beneath My Wings.” But still, Lil Jon’s music is essentially one big game of Simon Says, as paraphrased by the astute critic Keith Harris: “Lil Jon says bend over! Lil Jon says touch your toes! Now shake your tailfeather! Ho, Lil Jon didn’t say to shake no tailfeather!” Now imagine all of that screamed through a microphone, accompanied by tooth-rattling bass, and you’ll get a good sense for what his set was like.
50 Cent came on next, wearing black, and before long he was joined by the members of his G Unit crew. You can’t spell G Unit without g-u-n, and indeed the set included so many gunfire sound effects that the listener eventually became desensitized. As for 50, he wasted little time in getting to “I’m Supposed to Die Tonight,” a song from his new disc, “The Massacre,” in which he promises to make disrespecting foes tongue-kiss his weapon. For such a tough guy, 50 has a surprisingly sensual side, as evidenced by his hit “Just a Lil Bit,” but back-to-back renditions of “Magic Stick” and “Candy Shop” suggested that he may be running low on this kind of material — as Fat Joe has pointed out, the songs are nearly identical. That hurt his case, as did a monotonous delivery that robbed him of his nuance and charisma, making his material blur.
50 partially redeemed himself during Eminem’s set, when the two collaborated on an inspired version of the menacing “Patiently Waiting.” Although Em also yielded time to D12, Obie Trice and Stat Quo, he remained the star, reeling off “Mosh,” “Rain Man,” “The Way I Am,” “Mocking Bird,” “Lose Yourself” and many, many more. Still, he relied too heavily on shortened versions. Perhaps the editing allowed him to cram more tracks into his set list, but since he has the best lyrical flow on the tour, it would’ve been nice to hear him, y’know, perform a few more songs to the end.
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