Skip to main content

Black Eyed Peas review – pop air-punchers revisit conscious hip-hop roots

Hammersmith Apollo, London
Led by Will.i.am and with surprise guest Nicole Scherzinger, a more subdued Peas swap visual dazzlement for 90s-inspired beats

Last time the Black Eyed Peas played London, in 2010, they could barely move for props and effects. A motorcycle zipped overhead, costumes bristled with end-of-the-world hardware, fans’ real-time BlackBerry messages were displayed on a screen. This time? Not so much. It’s not quite Austerity Peas at this tour-opening show, but it is a visually subdued set, inasmuch as this group ever do things by halves. There is little in the way of dazzlement, apart from several moments when fans who had downloaded an app point their phones at the stage to see bursts of hearts and pyramids.

The reason for the downsizing can be inferred from frontman Will.i.am’s mid-set address to the audience. Since the departure of singer Fergie last year, the group have reverted to the original rap-based trio of himself, Taboo and Apl.de.ap, and rediscovered their conscious hip-hop origins. Shaken by Ferguson and Donald Trump, they resumed releasing new music last January, after a gap of seven years. The urgency of tracks such as Ring the Alarm and Constant – both played tonight – has inspired waggish nicknames like De La Peas. Will makes no apology. “If you like boom-bap hip-hop, pick up the new album [Masters of the Sun, Vol 1],” he advises. “If you like I Gotta Feeling, pick up The E.N.D.” Their 2009 LP sold 11m copies.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2EPcSGY
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more