When Anti-Pop Consortium formed in 1997, they formed as a counterpoint to the banal mess that mainstream hip hop had become. APC’s genesis was to be the unification of independent poetic voices into a single force in the rap world, a statement that intelligent rap would not go quietly into the good night. For better or for worse, after twelve years, five LPs, and a five-year stint in which they pursued solo projects, those poetic voices remain distinctly independent.
There are few groups as appropriately named as Anti-Pop Consortium, for that is exactly what Beans, High Priest, M.Sayyid, and Earl Blaize are: a confluence of independent artists standing against the degradation of pop music. There is no leader, no hierarchy within the group. Ideas seem to flow freely between members, songs are added and subtracted to the setlist based on general consensus, and each rapper takes a turn monopolizing the microphone when his time comes. Thursday night at Great Scott, these four artists put their minds together, hunched over a table full of synthesizers, beat pads, and knobs, and tried to make art.
I say tried because they never got it quite right. The show started with swirling synth pads and whispers of a beat that never arrived, a long jam of a prologue that had little to do with the meat of the performance. With each member of the foursome manning his own side of the table, the focal point of the ensemble was at the center of the stage, a point invisible to the audience in the pit a few feet away. This theme continued as APC launched into older tracks to kick off the concert; M.Sayyid stood shrouded in shadow, Beans was sequestered in the back corner of the stage, Earl Blaize barricaded himself behind the table, and High Priest rapped at the front with his back to the crowd for entire songs. For the first twenty minutes of the show, the audience was a bit of an afterthought. “Is this what they mean by anti-pop?” I thought to myself. “Are we, the audience, somehow complicit in the declining quality of the Billboard Hot 100?”
As the night went on, Anti-Pop Consortium began to win the crowd back, displaying some fine musicianship and a genuine appreciation for the fans on the floor. New songs like “Volcano” mixed with fan requests like “Ping Pong” to build an eclectic setlist that fit the group and the venue well. The quartet is about as close to a jam band as a hip hop act gets (with the exception of the inimitable Roots), and the extended encore jam, which featured some improvisational beats and freestyle flows, was an impressive off-the-cuff treat. In the end, though, the focus was in the wrong place.
Anti-Pop Consortium faces a disparity in talent and a lack of cohesion that hurts their live show and threatens to condemn the group to mediocrity. Beans is clearly the best rapper in the group, Earl Blaize is a technician on the knobs, and M.Sayyid—despite reminding me a bit too much of a poor man’s Saul Williams—is a phenomenally energetic voice and presence on record and on stage. The centerpiece of APC’s live act, however, is High Priest, a non-descript rapper who added very little (and indeed, detracted on more than one occasion) to the music being produced by the collective.
Ask anyone who’s ever worked on a high school group science project, and they’ll tell you that collaboration can be painful. The most difficult part is often choosing the right leader to steer the group toward success. On Thursday night at Great Scott, Anti-Pop Consortium eschewed their responsibility to make that choice, and hurt themselves in the process. But then again, maybe having a beat-maker, a frontman, and a backup hype-man would be a little too poppy. And isn’t that what brought these guys around in the first place?
