People Under the Stairs

Legends of Underground Hip-Hop anyone? The People Under the Stairs were in Portland on Friday and my buddy Adam and I decided we should probably check this out given what we have heard about these indie rap gurus, so we headed over to the Hawthorne Theatre an hour and a half after the show was scheduled to begin. We figured this would be ample time to miss the opening acts which we cared nothing about… we were wrong. The show was 5 hours long. We were standing for quite some time, and unfortunately for the acts, their turntables died and they were running the entire show off of iTunes from the back of the house. Each song had to be faded out rather than mixed into the next song. It was pretty interesting, allowing for a lot of weird silence and an overall loss of crowd energy. Luckily for the headliners there were using different gear and had no problems. Their set was exactly what they had promised, a high energy lyrically charged underground hip-hop event. They had the crowd’s attention and with it they set the place on fire. Double K and Thes One both spit some very hot fire, and Thes One was all over the freestyle throughout the night. However he couldn’t get away from calling Portland “Rip City”. While totally accurate, it got kind of old. Did I mention they are from L.A., because they sure did. As with much of the hip-hop culture, especially the underground crowd, where you are from means even more than what you saying, so every other song was often about where they were from. I am not from L.A. I am from Spokane, and I just so happened to run into a bunch of kids that I went to high school with. A few of them moved to Portland after graduating and a bunch of them were in town visiting. All of us meeting at the concert was a crazy coincidence. I am not from L.A.

People Under the Stairs from Aaron Nicholls on Vimeo.