A3C Hip Hop Festival

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the A3C Independent Hip Hop Festival (www.a3cfestival.com) in Atlanta, GA. Promotions were large for the three-day festival with a Juice Crew reunion to be held
on Friday night (with Marley Marl, MC Shan, Roxanne Shanté, Biz Markie, Big Daddy Kane and Craig G). But with limited time, I chose to take in the opening night show of Del the Funky Homosapien, Little Brother, Jeru tha Damaja and Wale.

Now, Del's DJ Zac Hendrix happens to be a friend of mine, or, at least, we've been trading vinyl for 5-6 years and this seemed a great opportunity to hook up. He flew into Atlanta on Thursday afternoon, got me a VIP pass and it was on. He even bought $20 in records from me and hooked me up with some New Zealand Hip Hop CDs (Breakin Wreckwordz Vol 1 and 2).

The 2007 edition of the festival was much smaller, the venue, the crowds, one vendor selling CDs of all the acts. But this year, the gang at A3C stepped way up. First, the sponsors: MySpace sponsored the first night of performances, which is probably why we had more well known names. The festival had about 20-30 sponsors this year including Vestax (they had a dope booth with all kinds of new DJ equipmet), Fatbeats.com, HipHopDX.com (with free mixtapes), custom t-shirt makers, customer sneaker designs, backpacks, damn, even PETA was in the house with petitions. Did I forget to mention all the artists had tables of music and gear for sale too?

The venue (Center Stage) held several hundred on the floor plus arena style seating up the sides and back where several hundred more were chilling. They had the light show. They had the big video screens. (One down side, I wish they had broadcast the performances onto the monitors in the vendor area. Usually the video screens had art and vendor logos spinning on it, except when Del played and they brought a custom montage with Hiero graphics and video.)

We got in a bit late and Wale was already on stage. I didn't see their whole set, and I wasn't really familiar with them coming into the festival. They have a dope live show. They remind me a bit of the Roots with the live instruments but also a DJ and bongo drums added for that DC go-go flavor. Zac set up his vendor booth with their manager and we chilled there for a while selling mixtapes and t-shirts (and Del's new CD, Eleventh Hour).

I rushed the auditorium when I heard the D. Original beat and checked Jeru's whole set. It's funny, I expected him to be this serious, militant MC, but instead he was joking around with the audience the whole time. He's a funny guy ("I gave up smoking, so now I drink too much.") and he gave a lot of pounds and call outs to people in the audience (including J-Live!). He spit knowledge between songs and led us all in the lyrics of our favorites. And he did a couple new joints. (He has a new album out too.)

Chilling again with Zac, Del arrived from the airport and his performance compadres Bukue One and A-Plus (yes, of Souls of Mischief) hit the booth with us for a while. Diamond D and YZ were walking around. A DJ in the vendors' area was spinning classic early 90s Hip Hop while several b-boys broke it down.

Del's crew had to set up, so I jumped in to see Little Brother's set, obviously who the crowd came to see. The place was packed (and the weed smoke was thick!) and even the backstage guests crammed the stage, about 30 of them. Little Brother's show was live, for sure. They had a couple of special guests (can't remember their names - I don't follow the group really closely). When the set was done, most people headed out for a break and, sadly, a lot of them didn't come back.

Bukue came on and tried to warm up the crowd. Del and A-Plus came out and performed a couple new songs, and a bunch of classics from Del including Misterdobolina and Dr. Bombay. A-Plus did a solo song and they even brought out Chip-Fu from the Fu-Schnickens to sing Ring the Alarm, which was fresh.

Before the set, I told Zac how sad it was that people didn't know a lot of these amazing performers from 10-15 years ago (like X-Clan, who I saw last fall open for Jurassic 5, and people said, "Who?"). Zac told me it's up to us to teach the newcomers about those cats if we want them to appreciate the contribution. This couldn't have been more obvious that when Del asked the crowd, "How many of y'all down with real Hip Hop?" and about half the people cheered. Del said, "so the rest of y'all are here just to party then?" Del said he was cool with that but I can't help but think if the partying half knew what the "down" half knew, Hip Hop culture would be a lot stronger.