Along with 5,000 of my closest friends, I trekked deep, deep into the heart of Brooklyn to BACARDI’s B-Live on Saturday night, catching an epic set from Calle 13, Talib Kweli, and Sean Paul.
Before I go any further, some full disclosure: the event was produced by Clubplanet’s parent company, Track Entertainment, meaning that, well, if I didn’t like it, I’d be fired.
Happily, I don’t need to spin a damn thing: the concert killed. Normally at these kind of music festivals, each artist only gets maybe 30 minutes stage-time, performing just some truncated versions of their most crowd-friendly hits. Here? The Big 3 (Calle, Talib, Sean Paul) were each given over an hour to perform, so you actually got a rhythm, sustained energy. An ebb and flow for each set.
Calle 13 took the stage around eight o’clock and asked the question that we’d hear again and again all night: “Where Brooklyn At?!?!?” Now, maybe it’s just me, but when you think about it, can you really ask that question when you’re actually in Brooklyn? I was kinda hoping the crowd would respond back in unison, “Um, we’re in it.”
Anyway. Before Talib hit the stage, DJ Mark Ronson piped in a few tracks, getting the crowd good n’ crazy with—you can guess this one—yep, Kanye’s “Survivor.” (I think even my grandma knows to play “Survivor” in a mash-up set.) Ronson also thanked the crowd for coming and said a few words in a British accent (leading to a furious debate within CP of whether he actually is British or whether he’s just acting British to push his new British-friendly albums. For those of you scoring at home, he was born in London but grew to prominence in New York.) CP reporter Diana Kost was on the scene to record the above video; click it to learn why she's a writer, not a videographer.
An otherwise flawless production was interrupted, briefly, when two girls started cat-fighting in the front row. But even this turned out well: Talib actually stopped his act and told the bitches to knock it off; the crowd laughed and ate it up.
I spent most of my time with the Clubplanet TV crew, interviewing random concert-goers, “testing out” the Bacardi raspberry mojitos (they passed the test, but I drank several more just to ensure scientific accuracy), and saving our lovely hosts from getting hit on and groped. After all the posing and camera-phones, it’s possible our CPTV hosts will be on like 10,000 MySpace pages as of Tuesday morning. (Speaking of, stay tuned for the first few episodes of Clubplanet TV…)
I’ve heard Talib a million times on the radio (kids, to learn about this strange device called a “radio,” click here), but I’ve never seen him live. Night and day. Talib has a charisma, a stage-presence, that just doesn’t translate to MP3—he lit it up.
“Where Brooklyn At?!? Where Brooklyn At!??!!?”
(We’re still here.)
Sean Paul closed things out with a 90-minute performance, highlighted (for me, at least, along with the other 2,500ish dudes in attendance) by his bootylicious dancers.
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