Couple of things before we get into today’s story:
First - The Super Dope cassettes are back from the manufacturer and will be shipped out in the next few days. You should have the copy you ordered in the next few weeks. It will still be another few weeks for the CDs. Thanks for your patience. As I mentioned before, we expect the vinyl in the fall.
Second - follow @DopeNotHype on Twitter. This is not a suggestion, it’s an order. You’ll learn all about this deep hip hop stuff I’m always blabbing about.
Now. In the 1990s, I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Halifax is a college town. There’s a big art school there, a bunch of universities, a technical college… So as you might expect, the downtown area - where the bars and restaurants are - is pretty busy. Most of the flow of people downtown passes through an intersection known colloquially as ‘Pizza Corner’. It’s the intersection of Grafton Street and Blowers Street. It’s something of a Halifax landmark. It’s called Pizza Corner because there are pizza joints on three of the four corners. On the fourth corner, there’s a church. In front of the church is a low stone wall upon which people sit and eat their slice (or donair - the local delicacy). I used to live directly across the street from the church, above one of the pizza joints. If I remember correctly, I lived there from late ’96 or early ’97 to 1999.
In 1997, the Language Arts album came out. I came up with the idea that for a release show, I’d perform for the visitors of Pizza Corner from my apartment. I didn’t promote the show or anything. I just did it. The technical setup wasn’t sophisticated. My turntables and mixer were set up in their own little room. Cables from the back of the mixer ran into an amp that sat on my couch in the living room. The speaker cables ran across the living room floor and the speakers themselves were jammed into the windows which overlooked Pizza Corner. I invited friends over to perform and warm things up and then I performed Language Arts in its entirety. Sometimes we’d chill on the couch while we rapped, sometimes we’d stick our heads out the window and interact with the people below. It was the most comfortable performance of my entire career. It didn’t feel risky at all because no one knew who I was so I didn’t care if they knew where I lived.
It was a weird idea and I remember that I fully expected to be shut down by police. But it went off without a hitch! Lots of people stopped to watch and listen. Smiling faces everywhere. No complaints. It made people happy even though we were inflicting upon them the most uncompromising brand of hip hop imaginable. It went so well that - looking back - I don’t know why I didn’t do it again. I should have been doing it once a month! If I performed from my living room window today, it would be for an audience of raccoons only.
It’s a little bit amazing to me how many times people have brought up that living room show. It seems that no one who happened to pass through Pizza Corner that evening in the summer of 1997 has forgotten it. I know I never will.