Needle in the MOSH PIT 11.20.07: Hellyeah! A Fish Out of Water
Posted by Jamie Mitchell on 11.20.2007
Today I bring you a tale of a Hip-Hop connoisseur at a HEAVY METAL concert. It wasn’t a pretty picture… downright uncomfortable, but in the end, it appears that Metal and Hip-Hop concerts do have one thing in common and it’s definitely NOT the music!
"I'm a little bit Country; I'm a little bit Rock & Roll. I'm a little bit Hip-Hop; I'm a little bit Neo Soul."
Salutations,
Primarily speaking, this is a Hip-Hop column written by one who lives for the business, the genre and the lifestyle. This week, we're going to differ from the norm and take a step away from the hood, and into another area of town.
Not to bore you with to many details from my real life, but I've recently taken on a new role at the Lexus dealership I work for. In addition to being that customer service guy, I'm also a partial assistant to the Internet Sales team. Basically, I do the cleanup for certain leads that slip through the cracks, and if I save the deal with my daring do, I am compensated. It's not a bad gig, actually. Well, one of the guys I work with wanted to show your boy his appreciation for helping out and stepped to me this week with a question, "Dude, have you ever heard of a band called Otep?"
I analyzed the question…
1.) This cat's never called me ‘dude' before this time.
2.) No offense, but the phrase ‘Have you ever heard of A BAND CALLED' when asked by a 40 year old Caucasian gentleman to a 28 year old African American gentleman who's into near exclusive Hip-Hop in regards to music, 9 times out of ten the answer is no, regardless of who ‘the band' is. It's the same as if I asked homeboy if he's ever heard of a crew named Black Wall Street.
Okay, so that wasn't a fair comparison… half the guys in Black Wall Street don't even know who Black Wall Street is…
3.) Is Otep even a word?
4.) The word ‘band' relates to how many groups in Hip Hop? Like, one. The Roots… unless you're talking about D12, which is also a band by their own admission, sort of.
5.) If this is indeed a ‘band' and their name is ‘Otep' I can probably assume this isn't the Hip Hop friendly Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy or Coldplay types that I'm semi used to tolerating.
Yeah, it's like that.
So my boy asked me to roll with him to check out one of his favorites, Otep at the House of Blues here in Vegas on Saturday. I checked with the other half for the okay, and it was on. The Showtorious One was all set to make his first non-Hip Hop/Jazz/Pop/R&B/Country/Soul concert cameo.
To get prepared, I did research on the group. Ironically, I pulled up my homepage, 411mania, and Mitch had posted a news article featuring you guessed it, ‘Otep.' Well, hell… Metal music. But they were covering a Nirvana song on MTV.com so it couldn't be that bad. I mean, it's Nirvana. They had that one song, um… Smells like, no… it was that one in the high school and… Help me out here people. I know nothing about this type of music.
As aforementioned, the concert emanated from the House of Blues, in Mandalay Bay. After downing a fifth of Tennessee Whisky at my boy's house, we arrived at about 8:15. Turns out that Otep and the curtain jerker band had already come and gone, (What? That early? Oh wait, this isn‘t a rap concert. LOL) but the main event had yet to start. We made our way through the masses to the bar and ordered up. Since I was already sipping on Jack Daniels that afternoon, I continued the trend. My homeboy picked up a couple shots of Patron and a beer. Objective #1, done. Stay drunk.
I began working on objective #2 at that point. Obtaining females. E-Dogg is a little shy when it comes to Vegas girls, so I offered to take the lead. Not looking for anyone myself, (me and my girl are cool) I began a visual of the place. I noticed a few things. The most glaring would be the fact that there were only 4 brothers in the whole place besides me, and two on them cats worked there. I also noticed that I was the only one who actually looked stereotypically brother-ish. Truthfully, I looked like I was going to a Jay Z concert. I had a RocaWear hat on, jeans, and a So Hood T-shirt. Oh, there was one sister there too. She was with a white dude, of course. I digress, but only slightly as I had to set up why objective #2 failed. As I was about to step to some of these rocker chicks, my boy pulled me to the side and told me that it might not be a good environment to do so. I'm like, why?
Apparently there are a lot of ignorant (read: racist) people who come to these shows. Allegedly, if my fish out of water self were to put game on some of these women, the bald white dudes with the swastika tattoos may take offense and come in my direction. Me, typically not one to LOOK for racist people started looking around. "Fuck outta here," I thought to myself. "These are good folks here, with a rough look perhaps, but they're not trying to start any trouble, especially in such a diverse place like Las Vegas." Then I looked around more. Okay. So… there were quite a few gentlemen there who had swastika tattoos as such, and looked like they could start trouble if provoked. Rather than try to be Superplayer, my spider sense told me to heed E-Dogg's words and be cool, I'd have to hook him up another day. Shortly after this decision, the headliner, Hellyeah, made their way to the stage.
What transpired for the next hour and thirty minutes was some loud, incomprehensible, head banging ass shit. That's the best I can describe the music styling of Hellyeah. The drums and guitars were nice and loud, and the lighting effects were on point, but I swear to Goddess that I couldn't understand shit that fool said into that microphone. The only time I understood anything was when we were chanting ‘HELLYEAH!' at various parts of the show. Not one to be a total asshole and leave, I made the best of my environment. I threw up my rocker gang sign (or is that some king of peace sign?), and went with the flow, pumping my hands in the air and even violently swinging my head up and down, Beavis style.
Five minutes later, my boy warned me not to be too aggressive, should I decide to enter the mosh pit. Don't get me wrong, I've been in a mosh pit before back in 1999. However, that wasn't this type of crowd. That was for a bitch ass Kid Rock concert, not this Pantera/Mudvayne/Nothingface/Damageplan beast that I was attending on this night. Needless to say, my black ass was chilling right the fuck where he left me. I wasn't about to jump into that shit. The next thing I knew, he was elbowing his way through the crowd, right to the middle of the drunken mob.
Now what we didn't know was that moshing was illegal at HOBLV. So when my boy got picked up over the crowd's head and tossed around near the front of the stage, that was the last time I saw that fool for the night! Mind you, this is only say, 20 minutes into the Hellyeah set, so not only did I stand out like an brownie in a sea of macaroons, my macaroon abandoned me for the Holy Metal Gods.
"Oh well," I thought. I didn't think anything of it, really. I wasn't trying to sift through the whole crowd looking for him. I figured we'd just meet up at the end of the night outside the club. I continued to my façade of rocking out with the masses. Fast forward…
An hour after the show ended and the groupies cleared out my boy still hadn't come out of the arena. That's when the sensible Hip-Hopper in me kicked back in. As I glanced at the time the first thing thought that popped in my head was, "This motherfucker got arrested."
The second thought was, "Fuck it, I drove." That said, I drove the fuck off, I had a birthday party to go to.
I didn't want to leave homeboy, but damn… it's not like I have a taxi meter installed on my whip, and my homegirl was waiting for me… so there. Wait for drunken homeboy, or hang out with pretty homegirl/drinking ace.
I fucking DARE you to say you wouldn't have done the same!
And so, that is how things went down at my first heavy metal concert. The people were definitely a sight to behold. The music, while not my cup of tea lyrically, was decent and energetic… and similar to any good Hip-Hop concert, n***as do stupid shit and get arrested.
I just never thought it'd be the n***a I was with to be that stupid n***a to get arrested. That's my boy though, and I'm sure there will be more drunken hilarity to ensue again in the future!
UPDATE: It turns out that dude didn't really get arrested. He got 86ed after moshing his way on stage. Good times, good times.
