Live and indirect: why is live hip-hop so terrible?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/live-and-indirect-why-is-live-hip-hop-so-terrible

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Live hip-hop can be awful. Case in point: Kanye West’s Billboard music awards closing performance on Sunday night. Kicking off with recent single All Day and segueing into Black Skinhead, it was a miserable viewing experience. First of all, ABC censored huge portions of the song with silence replacing West’s performance. Also, a combination of smoke and fog from the stage show obscured the visuals almost entirely. One assumes Kanye was performing with Theophilus London and Allan Kingdom, who are on All Day, but it was hard to tell.

Related: Kanye West says Billboard music awards ‘grossly over-censored’ his performance

Many people share blame for this. The network’s censor had an itchy mute button finger, and the stage production folks botched things. TMZ noted that Kanye didn’t do a dress rehearsal, which certainly contributed to the chaos. We probably shouldn’t dump on him too much, though, considering that big stars skipping rehearsal is common at events like these. Plus, Kanye is known for taking his stage show seriously. You may have found the Yeezus tour, with its giant ersatz mountain and nearly naked disciples, a bit over the top (literally), but it’s hard to criticise West for that considering he worked with award-winning designer Es Devlin, the mind behind work as diverse as the set for American Psycho: the musical, the Royal Opera House’s production of Don Giovanni, and Miley Cyrus’s world tour.

Unfortunately, when it comes to live rap shows, that’s not usually the case. At a typical hip-hop show, the rapper (and, if you’re lucky, a DJ) show up with some MP3s. Someone presses play, and songs are performed just as they are on record. There’s little thought put into things like choreography or crowd engagement. Personally, I find it most annoying when the DJ constantly cuts the beat and the audience is expected to perform half the lyrics. Further, audio is typically muddy, and rap shows often start late and end all too quickly. (I know, I sound like that Annie Hall joke: “The food at this place is really terrible … and such small portions”). Most egregiously, some rappers (well, MF Doom) don’t even bother showing up.

Bad rap performances are even stranger when you think about how hip-hop began: as a party. The genre’s defining element, the breaks, were mined from the breakdown segments of records from other genres, the parts of songs that really made the crowd get down. Hip-hop wasn’t recorded in studios until many years after it began. In its first years it existed solely in the live form, with New York DJs rocking outdoor parties, small apartments, schools, wherever. The focus was entirely on getting the crowd excited, and DJs innovated by focusing on what accomplished this, while tossing out what didn’t.

And I’m not saying modern hip-hop shows can’t be amazing. Jay Z famously took things to the next level by enlisting the live support of The Roots, who have since shown how it’s done night after night on late-night television. In fact, having a band is almost always a good idea. BadBadNotGood significantly enhances shows when they perform with folks like Tyler, the Creator and Ghostface Killah. The Social Experiment playing with Chance the Rapper is fun to watch. And to be sure, there are plenty of rappers who kill it just by being themselves; Run The Jewels and Waka Flocka Flame come to mind. Meanwhile, if lyricism in a live setting where you can actually hear the words is what you’re after, then battle rapping delivers. In fact, the discipline has largely broken off from mainstream rap music and become a compelling spectator sport all its own.

But as a general rule, rap shows are underwhelming. And not just smaller events at bars or clubs. Some of the biggest are largely lip-synched, like Eminem’s tour with Rihanna last year. Do you think the Rolling Stones or Fishbone would pull a stunt like that? Unfortunately, many rappers don’t realize that what makes live shows exciting are their differences from the studio recordings. New interpretations, new verses, a chance to take things up a notch. If we want to hear album versions we can stay at home and save $75.

Considering that profits from recorded music are a fraction of what they used to be, many musicians are relying on live shows to make up the difference. But of the top 15 most successful tours last year, only one was from hip-hop and that was a joint Jay Z and Beyoncé outing. It seems clear that for the genre to continue to prosper, performers are going to need to start taking an old-school approach to rocking a crowd.