A Concert Review by Tim Perry
Being introduced to new music is always an exciting experience for me even if it isn’t rap music, because that’s just how important it is to me. I admit, before me buddy Josh hit me up telling me he had two tickets to the Mick Jenkins concert, I had never heard of him. Keep in my mind I not only follow rap very closely, but I’m also from Chicago, as is Jenkins. His style, prior to any listening, was explained to me to be halfway between Chicago’s famed savage Cheef Keef and Chicago’s famed experimenter Chance the Rapper. Jenkins was supposed to fit right down the middle. At first glance that comparison of Chicago styles seems rather outlandish, impossible even; Cheef Keef and Chance aren’t exactly two sides of the same coin. Cheef Keef is more like the tails side on a 50 cent piece and Chance is more like a 6 sided dye, and Mick Jenkins is, apparently, somewhere in between.
It’s safe to say I didn’t know what to expect. That element of mystery just added to the excitement. The concert was at the Masquerade, arguably Atlanta’s most vintage, if not famed, concert venue. Georgia Tech is literally right up the street, so my roommate and I decided to traverse the mile or so on foot. We naively underestimated the distance however. On the final stretch, with the Masquerade in sight on the other side of the street, and the white pedestrian walking man preparing to grant us safe passage to the end of the ticket holder line, a homeless man approaches us.
Living in downtown Atlanta, you learn not to carry cash on you anymore, not because you’ll get robbed or anything of that sort (frequently), but because you won’t have to lie to a homeless person telling them “I don’t have any cash” when what you really mean “I don’t have any cash FOR YOU”. Subtle difference. He asks is he can just spit some spoken word, and if he’s good enough, we might spare a dollar or two. I tell him we’re trying to get to this concert and that we’re in a rush, but he just assured me that, to accommodate us, it was no problem, so he walked with us. I forgot that homeless people don’t exactly have a place to be. I caved, and said sure, and he began to rhyme, and, oddly enough, it was good. I made a mental note to have him feature on the mixtape. After he was finished, I told him we didn’t have any cash to which he immediately cursed us for wasting his time. As he left, I responded, “I thought you were just trying to speak to people”. He responds “not for free”.
When we finally get into the concert, our venue, aptly named “Hell”, was strikingly small. And it was only half full, and thirty minutes behind schedule. The only music you heard was from the adjacent concerts in the next rooms. 15 minutes passed of just standing there, talking with strangers to just see how many people really messed with Mick Jenkins, and it seemed like everyone there was as driven to his cause as I am to the Dreamville cause. A DJ came on stage, plugged in his MacBook pro, and just started playing music that he had mixed. I thought, was this STWO, Mick Jenkins’ opening act? If it is, he was pretty good. People were bumping with him, and I was too. Then a guy came on stage and said “give it up for --” and then he mumbled the mystery DJ’s name. He had an accent. This new newcomer was actually STWO, which, to this day, I have no idea how to pronounce. He was from Paris, so the accent made sense.
I cannot quite put into words my disappointment in his set, but I will try. All the momentum of the concert that mystery DJ brought on stage with him had disappeared the second he passed the aux cord. STWO’s music seems to be samples of random household noises like the dishwasher or the washing machine backed by a techno EDM type beat and rhythm. Almost every song. He sampled Drake at some point, which, depending on who you ask, might be more household noises. About an hour passed and every sober person standing was waiting for the Paris menace to evacuate the stage. Sobriety, by the way, in an Atlanta concert is rare to come by, and that would change when Mick Jenkins came on the stage. I tried to give STWO the benefit
benefit of the doubt, being from Paris and not quite knowing what Americans, and mainly Atliens bump to. Then I remembered a rapper named Bas, who was from Paris and Queens and being able to hear both cities in his music. Example, listen to a song from his Freshman album Last Winter, a song named “My Nigga Just Made Bail” with a guest verse from J Cole, the beat is European but that doesn’t make you like it any less, on the contrary. So I came to the conclusion that STWO is just short of garbage, and I say short of because at least he knows how to close a set. His last two songs were “Alright” and “i” by Kendrick Lamar, both played in their original versions. At least he succeeded to pump up the crowd in the end, so much so, in fact, that it prompted me to video tape the crowd’s reaction to my snapchat story with the simple caption, “lit”.
Before Mick Jenkins even took the stage, he had another rapper open for him by the name of J. Scott or Scott Marley…he wasn’t really clear, but, he is a rapper from Ohio. I should add that he is impressive. He didn’t come prepared to play what the industry refers to as hits, he came up to the stage to preach. His main motivation was hip-hop, more notably perhaps the expression of what is real in our otherwise censored society through hip-hop and real lyrics. He began to preach about freedom, and how the only thing that matters is love and my immediate thought was “Damn, 2014 Forest Hills Drive hasn’t even been out a year and already niggas is vulture-ing off the message”, but that’s not what he’s about. When he was rapping, I could tell that he believed every single word that came out of his mouth, far from faked or improvised. A simple google search is not enough to find anything but his twitter, but it is there. He told the crowd, it has taken him 5 years to get to the point he is at. So in a way, his journey is equivalent to getting a college degree, just in a different school of thought. I am sure we’ll all see more of him pretty soon, so stay tuned for more of Free Nation, the name his militia goes by.
Drink more water. These are the three words Mick Jenkins lives by. It means to seek knowledge in much more depth than what they show in mass media and even through basic education. He is a knowledge and truth seeker, a real Huey Freeman. He started his show with songs from his newest album that immediately had the crowd bumping, so much so that the crowd made their way into the restricted areas to get a better view. There was even, and I cannot make this up, a tall lanky Chris Bosh looking mother fucker that stood on the tallest speaker and before long, was hanging from the ceiling- savage. Throughout the set Jenkins had the crowd respond to his “Drink. More!–“ with the loudest “Water!!!” that would probably have a passerby confused as to what the fuck was going on. The venue smelled like how I imagine Snoop Dogg’s dreads smell like: extremely dank; as I glanced to the police officer on the railing above me, I see a look that just says “fuck it” come across his face. It seemed like there was hit after hit after hit because the crowd new every single word to his songs. Just as one of his slower songs starts to end out of nowhere the beat changes and Mick Jenkins is singing NWA’s “Fuck the Police” that literally shook the venue. When Jenkins was out of songs, he brought all of Free Nation on stage for one more “Drink More Water” and on the last word, they all threw water on the crowd. The lights were crazy. The beat was crazy. The people on stage were acting a fool with people diving in the crowd and crowd surfing. Then it was over.
This ranks high in my book, the concert was definitely one to see. Of all the small intimate concerts I’ve been to, this ranks number 2 in terms of energy, content, and showmanship right behind J. Cole’s Dollar and a Dream tour in Atlanta celebrating Friday Night Lights run. If you’ve never heard of Mick Jenkins, it’s only a matter of time before you do. Chicago only produces talent: Kanye, Lupe, Twista, Chance, Omen, Vic Mensa, and now Mick Jenkins.