Ekoh wishes you a happy birthday at the Crystal Ballroom on Tuesday, 25 July 2023.

Kode Break delivers the hype.

Battlemode, Just For Kicks, Sturges, J-REM, and DJ Hero pass the mic in the opening slots.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate Bars Over Bars. What’s that?

It’s a Hip Hop Media Company in New England. OK, what does this hip hop company do? Make hip hop sprockets?

First things first, Bars Over Bars is responsible for organizing a ton of hip hop showcases at venues in and around Boston.

Sometimes it’s an open mic at a local club, sometimes it’s a houseparty, sometimes it’s a festival, you name it.

And sometimes Bars Over Bars helps get its artists involved as openers for national touring acts, like the Ekoh show at Crystal Ballroom.

The amount of hustle required to organize regular shows is considerable. The degree of drive to maintain a consistent presence in a music scene that is constantly melting around you and/or bursting into flames (everything is fine!) is impressive.

To top it all off, they even have a goddamn newsletter!

Bars Over Bars: DJ Heroes Among Us.

J-REM, Sturges, Just For Kicks

w/ DJ Hero

Straight outta Taunton! (My cousin’s from Taunton) It’s J-REM. Don’t forget the hyphen, or else you’ll Google Search a French rapper who puts out tracks like “Coquelicot vert.” Not bad, actually. No word on whether our local hero J-REM is planning a trans-Atlantic collaboration.

You know everyone in the music industry can play and perform, right? Sturges was working the merch table for Ekoh and Kode Break before he was called up in the second slot. You don’t need to sweat it out on a cross-country tour just to sell t-shirts. You do it because you love music, want to be around music, and maybe get a shot at making music. Celtics reporter Jay King vibes.

Just For Kicks delivered uptempo panic rap, complete with high kung fu kicks. The rapper out of Londonderry has been touring all over. But his latest accomplishment is recording smooth sounding single “Bless You”, built atop a sample of himself sneezing. Legit sneeze or staged sneeze, you decide.

Shout out to DJ Hero for laying down the backing tracks and jumping in to provide a verse in spots.

Battlemode

Boston’s chiptuner supremes Battlemode were the mystery act that couldn’t be announced until the day before the show.

Why all cloak & daggers? Because they played one of those local fests that wants to suck in all their artists’ mojo into their own event, like a black hole to light. Bigger shows will do the same thing.

Even smaller clubs are not super appreciative about artists booking shows too close in space and time to each other. But there are enough stages in enough odd corners around town to satisfy your urge to perform if you know how to mix and match your schedule correctly.

Rumor has it one or both members of Battlemode work at local music venues. They probably have a better understanding than most about what goes into promoting a show, how to work the calendar kung fu, how to hop on the bills they’re excited to hop on.

What bills are those? On Tuesday night it was the opening slot right before headliner Ekoh. Their 8-bit opera mixes together strands of hip hop, techno, and bliss pop into a meaty stew that made for a nice change of pace before settling in with the rap headliner.

Ekoh

w/ Kode Break

There’s a difference between an artist and a performer. One is not necessarily the other. Thankfully, Ekoh was both.

A musical artist is an artist who creates in the medium of sound. Every act on stage Tuesday night was an artist, who loved their craft, but all the openers are still working their way to becoming the kind of performer that we saw in the headliner Ekoh (and hypeman Kode Break).

What’s the difference anyway? Artists are just worried about nailing their art. A musician just wants to make sure their song came off. Big picture, that’s the main thing. If you have to pick between worlds, pick a world with all artists and no performers, rather than vice versa. But if you can have both…

A performer understands that there is an arc to a show, a narrative, a subterranean primeval series of rites to be executed. Hardly known or understood, but the best performers know how to act them out.

It’s something to do with creating an air of anticipation. That’s what’s openers are for. But even within Ekoh’s act, you have Kode Break opening at the start. The named headliner hasn’t even hit the stage. He’s there and not, at the same time. A man behind a thousand curtains while the openers and hype man rip away layer after layer, until the moment arrives.

It’s something to do with making a set about more than a series of songs. Case in point: the happy birthday announcement. Ekoh shouted out a happy birthday to a 10-year old fan, a young girl with huge mufflers on her ears, who was gifted a concert with her favorite artist. Her smile stretched for miles. A small moment in a longer show, but it’s one of those little moments that transcends the music to a bigger, brighter universe of human meaning.

It’s something to do with “activating” the performance space, dissolving the distance between artist and fan in physical, as well as emotional and intellectual, terms. Blowing up the Apollonian, diving into the Dionysian. Thank you, Nietzsche! Ekoh used the old punk n roll trick of leaping into the pit. Works for hip hop too, which puts its own spin on the routine.

Not all artists need to become performers. The world will keep turning. But smoke em if you got em.

Photo Gallery