Some of the biggest names in hip hop gathered at the Marcus Ampitheatre Friday night as part of the Smokin' Grooves tour, a great show full of surprises.
Smokin Grooves came to Milwaukee both in 1996 and '99 featuring headliners like The Fugees, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill and George Clinton. This year's acts were the Grammy-winning duo Outkast, The Roots, Lauryn Hill, Cee-lo and newcomer Truth Hurts. Unlike 1996, all of these acts boasted live bands in addition to deejays.
Truth Hurts and Cee-lo both had the shortest sets because they were performing material off of their recently-released first albums, which was unfortunate because each delivered a soulful, ecclectic sound that breaks the hip hop mold. The crowd was pretty light for those early performances -- missing Cee-lo's special brand of funk and Truth Hurts' gospel flavor, with its fiery touches of soul divas Mary J. Blige and Aretha Franklin.
Next up was Lauryn Hill, who calmly walked onstage without introduction or fanfare, sat in a wooden chair with three acoustic guitars behind her, picked up and began singing a new song, turning in a performance similar to her MTV Unplugged 2.0 performance, with the execption of a live drummer backing her up, and her adding one old song, "Ex-Factor," to the mix.
But there was no surprise there, as the artist proclaimed during the Umplugged special, "I don't perform anymore... I'm not an entertainer... It's all about the words." She ended her set, appropriately, with "I Get Out," a song where she, as an artist, demands the right to evolve in her artform and her self-expression. When the song ended, she stood up, wiped her face with a towel, removed her hat and left as modestly as she came in.
{INSERT_RELATED}After Hill was Philly group The Roots. While all of the acts had live bands, The Roots stood out in this regard because they were one of the first hip hop groups to utilize a live band as their mainstay (What about Stetsasonic? -ed.).
The Roots are working on their newest album, "Phrenology," and shared some of those new songs. They playfully blended reggae and rock influences for both the old and new hits. While their entire set was high energy, it was one of their members, Scratch, also known as "the human beatbox" who stole the show. Scratch beatboxed a version of the recent Busta Rhymes hit, "Pass the Courvoisier," that made the crowd go crazy.
The last, and undoubtedly best, act of the night was Outkast . Andre 3000 and Big Boi raised the Ampitheatre temperature at least 10 degrees on that already muggy evening as the audience pumped its fists to the hits "So Fresh, So Clean," "Ms. Jackson," "Da Art of Storytelling" and "Elevators." The supercharged "BOB (Bombs Over Baghdad)," with its confetti-explosion conclusion, capped off the evening with a big bang.
Overall, Smokin' Grooves sizzled, and not even a low-key Lauryn Hill could simmer the heat of this very electric show.
