| Print |

Written by Kyle Beachy Tuesday, 06 December 2005 05:24

Cincinnati, OH
August 8 and 9, 2003

I have seen 1,500 raised white fists pump furiously in time to the lilt of a generation’s wistful mouthpiece. I have seen Birkenstocks and platform flip-flops; Misfit shirts and hemp necklaces; pierced lips and low-cut ass-hugging jeans; many basketball jerseys and more trucker hats than one would care to count. I have seen people slam-dance and hippie-twirl to hip-hop music. I’ve seen groups of 17-year-old Barbies in matching “God Loves Ugly” girly-tees throw themselves at rappers from Minnesota and at people they mistook for rappers from Minnesota. And I’ve seen hungry talent from across the country ignore these same rappers so they can stand in a circle outside, in the rain, with no music, slinging impromptu insults at one another while onlookers ooh and ahh, and sometimes damn! or oh shit! I have seen all this because I have been to Scribble Jam in Cincinnati.

For 363 days of the year, Annie’s Night Club is a rather unspectacular midwestern concert venue and bar that plays host to classic rock acts. It’s two venues, really, with the huge outdoor stage and picnic area that overlooks the less-than-scenic Ohio River complementing a darker, smokier, and more personal indoor stage. Since 1997, the other two days at Annie’s have been reserved for Scribble Jam. On a dreary, wet Friday night and a gray but dry Saturday, Scribble Jam 2003 went down on August 8 and 9.

In 1997, Scribble Magazine initiated what would be an annual gathering of graffiti writers (“scribble,” get it?). Realizing that there was potential for something more than literally watching paint dry, Cincinnati’s own Mr. Dibbs, the tattooed, bald, goateed, scar- as-hell guy who deejays Atmosphere shows, took the reigns and transformed the modest event into one of the largest independent hip-hop concert/battle/expo/trade shows in the nation.

As mainstream hip-hop’s presence in popular culture has grown, so, too, has Scribble’s in the underground. Two years ago, the people at Scribble began outsourcing sales of tickets to Ticketmaster, that despotic, regretfully ubiquitous force in entertainment, to better serve the masses who flocked to Cincy every year. A local emcee named Priest, at this year’s Scribble to circulate his first demo, said, “It’s getting really commercialized. If you watch TV at all in Cincinnati, you’ll see commercials.”

For many, the main draw this year was the tenth anniversary celebration of Minneapolis’s RhymeSayers Entertain-ment, label to such indie behemoths as Eyedea and Abilities, Brother Ali, and of course, the lovable, angst-ridden Atmosphere. By 6:30 Friday night, the Annie’s parking lot was at capacity, filled with RVs and cars from across the country. Because of the rain, many of the vendors had moved their tables inside, lining the side and rear walls of Annie’s, further packing an already full venue. A rough estimate put the ratio of whites to persons of any color at somewhere near 10:1.

The night began with sets from Mars Ill, Roosevelt Franklin, and the Oddjobs, three non-RhymeSayers acts who got the crowd warm. As break dancers circled in the back of Annie’s, Los Nativos followed as the first RS representatives, and then Brother Ali came to the stage. A rotund albino with the most rugged voice on the label, Ali dominated the stage both physically and musically. (Murs later referred to him as “the killer snowman”). He ripped through songs off of his recent Shadows on the Sun LP, and the audience dutifully nodded and rapped along to “Room With a View,” “Dorian,” and “Forest Whitaker.” Ali gave way to Blueprint and Illogic, who performed tracks off of Blueprint’s The Weightroom and Illogic’s amazing Got Lyrics? The Micranots followed with a short set before Murs took the stage. Next came Eyedea and Abilities, who gave another predictably hype, technically astounding performance. After an extremely hype surprise appearance by underground legend MF Doom, who wore his trademark chrome “Metal Face” mask while doing classic tracks from Operation Doomsday, it came time for that special moment every female in the house was waiting for.

It’s hard to appreciate the apotheosis of Slug without seeing firsthand how women react to his presence. In a crossover that few would have predicted when Overcast! first emerged in 1997, Slug and producer Ant have attracted an enormous following of white teenagers, thanks mainly to Slug’s Caucasoid, accent-free voice and introspective, emotionally stripped lyrics. While their early music was dope, it was unpolished, rough, and raw. Since then, Atmosphere has refined their package and developed a more widely appealing, somewhat fuzzier sound, so that even the angry moments on God Loves Ugly are endearing and somehow soft.

Slug, for his part, doesn’t exactly avoid the rock star persona. “I’m single now,” he said during a break in his set. “I’m looking for a lady friend tonight.” In his hunchbacked stance, shoulders dropped groundward as if the ceiling were too low (it wasn’t) or the onus of all those longing fans was just too much for him to bear, Slug played the role of reluctant celebrity. Dibbs spun his standard heavy metal set, mixing Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” with Metallica’s “One” while Slug frantically bounced around the stage. It was, in essence, the show they’ve been doing for the past five years, and the crowd couldn’t get enough.

Saturday’s activities revolved around competition. In addition to the classic graffiti expo that dominated every inch of wall space on and around Annie’s, there were DJ, b-boy, emcee, and beat boxing battles throughout the day. As the rain threatened but never really came, crowds filled the outdoor portion of Annie’s, browsing among the vendors, paying way too much for beer, and taking in the day’s festivities.

It would be impossible to adequately describe each of the battles, but the important information is this: A-Train, a 27-year-old from Kansas City, won the inaugural beat boxing competition; Motion Disorder repeated as winners in the b-boy battle; Scratch Bastard, of the DJ crew 1200 Hobos, won the DJ battle with a routine in which he juggled Justin Timberlake’s latest single; and Rhymefest had the stamina to take home the annual emcee battle crown, narrowly beating Your Mama’s Pimp.

Other highlights of the day included Joey Beats, personal producer for Sage Francis, hawking his instrumental CD through a Fisher Price bullhorn; an utter failure of a stage dive by Deuce Leader during the emcee battle that resulted in a broken leg; and a performance by Denmark’s own DJ Static and Nat Ill, who blew the crowd away with their emcee/DJ interplay, further iterating the fact that hip-hop has become an international phenomenon.

Ill Poetic, who was ousted in the preliminary rounds of the emcee battle, came through with the quote of the day when he summarized how the men in the crowd felt about all the female fans who had come to hear Atmosphere: “This year is turning out particularly fresh, primarily because of the females. And God bless Slug, ’cause he can’t fuck all of them.”

There were some, though, who were visibly displeased by the size and makeup of the crowd. Qwel, a sharp-tongued emerging emcee from Chicago, has a line that goes, “I really hope your rap career grows/but now rappers rap half feminine like Atmosphere shows.” He, for one, could do without the explosion in the underground.
Standing in the Galapagos 4 booth with his label mate Offwhyte, Qwel lamented, “ "Everybody wants to rap. This place is full of pseudo intellectuals…and damn. Look at Barbie over there. What the fuck…Hip-hop is supposed to be your scumbag ass and my scumbag ass just kicking it.”

Fans of underground hip-hop (like independent music fans in general) are a fragile bunch. The alienation that accompanies a subculture’s elevation into the pop arena is ultimately what drives fans of that culture underground. What, then, is a fan to do when that underground is itself blown up and gains popularity? Two things: one, an infinite regression further and further away from the original source of that fan’s appreciation, and two, a cynicism not only toward the popular culture that has exploited the original source, but also for the newer, younger, or less true fans, the bandwagoners. Trump cards like “keeping it real” and “sellout” offer momentary solace, but are ultimately meaningless. Revive, a graff painter from Chicago somewhat embittered over graffiti’s fall to the wayside at Scribble (graffiti wasn’t even mentioned until 11:30 the second night), admitted, “People who complain about keeping it real aren’t making money.”

Revive, a graff painter from Chicago somewhat embittered over graffiti's fall to the wayside at Scribble (the graffiti wasn’t even mentioned until 11:30 the second night), admitted that, “People who complain about keeping it real aren’t making money.”

And if there’s one thing Scribble is doing, it’s making money. In addition to the $20 tickets for each night and inflated beer prices—“About a buck more for everything than usual,” one bartender told me—the organizers charge $250 per vending booth, of which there were 25. Also, this year Scribble had its first official corporate sponsor. To debut their new Scion line of cars, Toyota contributed a reported $10,000 to conspicuously park two cars at the event: one just outside the main entrance, the other in the center of the outdoor venue.

In the words of Qwel, “Scribble Jam exactly encapsulates what underground hip-hop is today.” Like the underground, it continues to grow, taking on new fans and sponsors along the way. On August 8 and 9, in the very heart of America, fans celebrated the independence of underground hip-hop. Some left with a feeling of enlightenment, of being part of something new and exciting. Others, though, left in search of the next next big thing, digging deeper underground to escape the harsh glow of pop’s searchlight. Because you get the feeling that 2004 might just be the year that Pepsi gets wind of the market, and we all know where that would take things…