I went to see Sole last Thursday. I don’t tend to go to too many hip-hop shows, but I like Sole enough to have found my way over to Cambridge to check out the show. The opening act, Grand Buffet, was – well – not that good. Sole was better, but I think (surprisingly) hip-hop just doesn’t do well in a live setting. MCs get too excited and rap too loudly, thus distorting anything they say. They don’t hold the mic correctly either. It might look cool, but it sounds like crap. Maybe sound engineers could do a better job EQing the mic, but at best their only partly to blame. Still a worthwhile show, coming to a town near you.
I picked up Sole’s second album, selling live water, and it sounds a million times better than the show. Highly recommended.
“The unwordable weirdness of coming across your own name in a search engine, like tow-stubbing your own tombstone at twenty-four in a backlit blur of message boards in the visceral black of abstract space.” – The Pedestrian