Lyricist Lounge: Hip-Hop on Lansdowne

"Bring hip-hop back! Bring hip-hop back!" went the chant that signaled the arrival of the Lyricist Lounge tour to the stage at Avalon last Friday evening. Despite the earliness of the hour -- doors were at 5, the show was set to begin at 6, and it actually started around 7 -- and the added inconvenience of having the now pennant-bound Red Sox play the Orioles directly across Lansdowne Street, Boston's hip-hop heads had filled Avalon nearly to capacity by the time the tour's organizers hit the stage to lead the call for hip-hop's return. Not that hip-hop is, on the surface at least, in any danger of going away. If the Billboard charts are any indication, the music Lyricist Lounge aims to save is as alive and kicking as it's ever been in 1998, with the No Limit crew (now including Snoop Dogg) helping to line Master P's walls with platinum discs, new rappers like Canibus regularly debuting in the Top 10, and Fugee Lauryn Hill impressing the critics almost as much as the fans who made her solo debut #1 last month.

But Lyricist Lounge -- which began as an NYC showcase for emerging beat poets (including the late Big E. Smalls) and has now expanded to include a new compilation CD and this tour featuring hosts De La Soul and emerging artists like Rah Sun, the Syndicate, Eminem, Matrix, and Black Star (who were a no-show at Avalon) -- ain't really all about, as Puffy puts it, the Benjamins. It's about the age-old tension between mainstream and underground, money and integrity, indie and major. And even though many of the tour's acts are gearing up for major-label releases (Rah Sun, for example, has his Interscope debut set for later this month), the point was to bring hip-hop back to the "street," or at least to clubs the size of Avalon -- back to the wheels-of-steel MCing that's now affectionately referred to as old school. That's why De La Soul DJ Maseo (you may remember him as P.A. Pasemaster Mase) could be heard dissing DAT-master Will Smith, and why a friend of mine chuckled when the Beastie Boyish duo Eminem (who scored audience points for dropping Lewinsky into one of their rhymes) had to ask the soundman to "rewind the DAT."

So maybe Lyricist Lounge is discovering that the line between mainstream and underground is as hard to locate in hip-hop as it is in punk and indie rock. Whether the music was live or on DAT, Lyricist Lounge's rappers made a convincing case for hip-hop at the club level. At Avalon the chant "Bring hip-hop back" also had a secondary, though perhaps more pressing localized meaning: rap shows like this are all too rare in Boston. Lyricist Lounge offered proof that the local audience exists. So maybe it really is time to bring hip-hop back.

-- Matt Ashare