Written by Sean Ward | Photography by Philip Litevsky

Hip-Hop culture is youth culture.  I’m not the first one to say that.  But the level to which it is true surprises me more and more every time I go out.  I recently happened upon a hip-hop night put on by and for the punk rock scene.  It was indescribably bizarre to see a club full of people with their faces covered in piercings, wearing studded and spiked leather jackets, getting down to Black Sheep and EPMD with no trace of irony at all.  I don’t know if this is a phenomenon unique to Toronto, but it sure hammers home the degree to which hip-hop has taken over.

While I didn’t see many punk rockers at the Sound Emporium on January 18, 2007 for the REMG presentation of De La Soul, the crowd represented a fairly accurate cross-section of the new hip hop audience.  In the front, you had the people who knew the material well.  In the back were the more casual fans.  Then you had one side of the room filled up with the hardcore-looking fans, the ones who are there for the artistry of hip-hop.  The more artsy-looking crowd, the people there for the beats and to dance, filled up the other.  It was kind of like the four quadrants of the hip-hop mind.  Interspersed throughout, there were representatives of all of the youth social classes from rockers to club kids to mall rats to squares and everyone else you can imagine.  I’ve been to many hip-hop concerts, but I have never seen an audience as diverse as this one. I’m not sure what kind of audience De La Soul is used to playing for but in Toronto they played for an audience that seemed, for the most part, really stoned.

The air grew thick with the smell of ‘jazz cigarettes’ as soon as the show started.  And because so much of the audience was under this influence, it affected their participation in the show.  The crowd was wild and threw themselves into the parade of classics that occupied the first 45 minutes of the show, but became quiet and subdued as the more obscure numbers rolled out.  There was also a growing feeling of impatience as the show went on, based on the fact that this venue on this night of the week is usually a dance club, and many of the people who came to see the show came to dance.

But De La Soul doesn’t want you to come to their show to dance.  Sure, they’ve got a few very upbeat and ass-shakable numbers from their early career.  But they had no problem letting this growing segment of the audience know that this show was not being put on for them. Don’t get me wrong: De La Soul are master showmen.  I will state it again for emphasis: De La Soul are master showmen. Twenty years in the game shows in their ability to capture the audience and have us all eating out of the palm of their hand.  And we’re happy to take part in it early in the show because De La Soul have a large selection of songs we love dearly.  But most of the people in attendance were either old fans that didn’t follow De La Soul on through their later work, or new hip-hop fans who are only just getting into De La Soul’s contributions to the canon of hip-hop essentials.   Either way, the show ran out of steam as De La Soul ran out of hits and they didn’t mind making sure the audience knew that they had no love for the people who just came to dance.  But even with that said, De La Soul gave the people what they wanted as they closed the show in a ‘quit while you’re ahead’ spirit, leaving the club to the kids who started dancing in a sea of crunched beer cups.

In the end, neither De La Soul nor the audience gave each other the night of their lives.  Regardless, we still had a great party.  But De La Soul, and every artist touring, needs to address the issue that this concert shines a light on.  The hip-hop landscape is changing rapidly.  The demographics of the audience are morphing in countless ways as you read this.  And each artist needs to make a decision: shall he stamp his feet and insist that the memory of a bygone time is more vital than what’s happening now, or shall he evolve and profit by changing with the times?