Lupe Fiasco live performance disaster averted thanks to iPod

I was fortunate enough to get an invite to last night's BPM/Best Buy E3 after party at the House of Blues in Los Angeles.  The atmosphere was great, the go-go dancers had it on and poppin', and the crowd of 300+ was diverse and in good spirits.  There were performances from a couple of pretty good bands, an insanely sick DJ set by Z-Trip (Nas acapella over a Maroon 5 beat? yes!), capped off by a hype electronic set by BT.  Tony Hawk showed up to talk about his new video game and Lupe Fiasco slipped in to drop some lyrical knowledge.  Too bad his DJ fucked up.

No one knew who Lupe Fiasco was.  He kinda just appeared on stage without proper introduction.  The majority of the crowd was like- "great, an unknown rapper guy." I had to explain his whole story and hype him up to the five immediate people around me.  The most audible crowd responses occurred when he announced that his upcoming album was being executive produced by Jay-Z (people were hoping Mr. Carter would make an appearance at that moment), and when the crowd mistook Lupe's hype man for Kanye West on the hook for an abridged version of Touch the Sky.  Hilarious.  There were fans, however.  I was one of maybe 10 people with my hands steadily rocking to the beat proclaiming Lupe as hip hop's lyrical savior.   He did a couple of joints from his mixtapes and was about to cap his performance with Kick, Push when his DJ completely fucked up.

The instrumental CD kept on skipping and repeating the first 4 bars right before the bass dropped.  Completely killed the moment.  DJ cued it back and tried it again to no avail.  And again.  And one more time, no dice.  Made Lupe look like an amateur act in front of a pretty influential/trendsetting crowd.

A visibly irritated Lupe spit a couple of freestyles to kill time before the DJ tried one last time, with the same embarrassing result.  With the crowd getting restless, Lupe tried to keep them on his side by having everyone chant "let's go DJ!" for a good couple of minutes.  After briefly proposing doing the song acapella (that would have sucked), Lupe's inept DJ got bailed out by someone in the crowd.  A guy in the front row pulled out his iPod nano that was loaded not only with Food & Liquor, but Food & Liquor Instrumentals.  Long story short the nano got hooked up to the sound system and the show went on to a low bitrate-quality instrumental.

Really ironic when you consider all the press around Lupe being pissed about the leak.  Here was a dude in the crowd with a full advance album and apparently an instrumental, handing it to Lupe to help finish the show.  Go figure.

Comments

[Hashim]

bananas! I want my copy of the instrumentals!

[Eric Nord]

Industry Rule 4081: hip hop shows suck

[yawn]

Do the world a favor and stop hijackin' this URL with your worthless drivel. It doesn't matter who posts on this site... it's a fuckin' snoozefest, which is unfortunate because the folks who post on this site ostensiblly know a ton about rap. But the posts are y-a-w-n boring.

Step up your game, bizitches. Please.

[Essex]

A real emcee knows that shit can happen even at the biggest show.
Lupe is the truth.
He gonna do well.

[drummer510]

Fiasco is tight, he's got hella sick flow. I don't know about some of his rhymes but they seem to work because of his smooth flow. Kick Push will be a big ass song. I have a bunch of friends who stuck wit skatin since elementary school and they think this cat is dope. So I think he'll definitely have the skatin folks to back him up when his album drops.

[x-ceptional]

you can get the rip of the vinyl single to kick push on some torrent sites like thepiratebay.org. i have had that for weeks and it even comes with a pic of the vinyl dude ripped it from. it has the instrumental and the acapella and both are also loaded on my 60GB Ipod Vid.

[Mujahideen Ryder]

Lupe also rejected to sign with Roc, cuz Jay Z asked him. Lupe said he wanted to start his own thing.

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[natas]

A Moment in Black History,

After selling ten million albums($200 million approx.) which included the song "Because I Got It Like That" written by the Jungle Brothers , they still haven't paid their share of the profits for the song "LikeThat"(feat.JohnLegend,Ceelo,TalibKweli,Qtip) from the album Black Eyed Peas album "Monkey Business".

Allegedly when Will.I.Am questioned Qtip about who wrote the song Qtip falsely stated that he wrote the original song. As a result Jungle Brothers were not credited as the original songwriters.

Qtip's outright lack of respect for the group that brought him out led to B.A.M. to writing and producing a "truth" record titled "Bamboozle"(Fuck Native Tongue) which can be downloaded at Myspace.com/paganlife.

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