zuuuuuluuuuu!

If you like hip hop at all, I don't ever want to hear you say, "Who's Afrika Bambaataa?" The goddamn George Washington of hip hop, the "Amen-Ra of Universal Hip Hop Culture," and he was at the Temple Bar in Santa Monica last night. I haven't been to a hip hop show, let alone a good hip hop show, in quite some time, and this was the hard hard shit. Bam's Belgian friend, whose name I didn't get, played about an hour set of funk so heavy you needed a forklift to get it off the floor...real old school, too, all James Brown, Bar-Kays and Parliament. The dude was a b-boy like they don't make them anymore: solid on the wheels, rapping in French, and poppin' to the beat. To my disappointment, the man Bambaataa Himself was fucking around with his computer for most of the night and never stepped to the decks, instead toasting on the mic and leading the finale of "Planet Rock." In the high point of the evening, however, homeboy from Power 106 took over from the Belgian guy with an insane mix of serious electro-funk, supporting the rhymes of none other than the original Soulsonic Force's Bizzie B. I swear, it was like being at a Boogie Down Bronx block party in 1979. You just don't get more old school than that show.
Like B said, "rap is what we do, hip hop is what we live." For real.