The crowd is lethargic, standing around looking nonchalant on the sparsely-populated dance floor; save for a single girl who is gyrating mechanically to the monotonous music spun by the in-house DJ, DJ Kez. As special guests of the Someday Lounge’s weekly hip hop event, The Fix, Tanya Morgan was scheduled to perform at 9:00. It is now 11:15 and the DJ has been playing what seems like the same jam for nearly two hours. Restless audience members step onto the dance floor, eyeball the stage, and return to the bar area. Hip hop does not favor the punctual. At last, the MC approaches the microphone and announces that, “real hip hop is in the building tonight.”
Tanya Morgan leap onto the stage and the crowd erupts! People appear out of nowhere and begin to move. Fortunately this will be a live show, rather than remixes of their recorded tracks. One of the three members, Ilyas, is not present, and the DJ remains onstage to provide backing tracks for Donwill and Von Pea. The beats are strong, and are a welcome departure from the ambient tracks he played earlier. Vocals, which are almost always too quiet during live shows, are cranked high. The performers have explosive energy and spit rhymes effortlessly, sounding as polished as a recording but with a force that is only present in person. The two men are comfortable onstage together, and add carefully choreographed moves to complement their lightning-quick rhymes. Their lyrics are packed with a mix of politics and pop culture, blending elements of classic hip hop with references to more modern practices like reading about themselves on Wikipedia and allusions to a fictional city called Brooklynati – a melding of Cincinnati and Brooklyn. They dedicate the second song to the record stores that are rapidly closing across the country, and implore the audience to show support for these businesses rather than downloading.
The group hasn’t appeared in Portland in two years, and they clearly have fans here. Audience members push their way to the front, and mouth the lyrics along with the performers. During a break, one of them tells the other he wants a Voodoo Donut, and the crowd cheers. They launch into another song, "So Damn Down," from their most recent album, Brooklynati. Donwill makes a quick plug for his solo release, Don Cusack in High Fidelity, out this year. During the next song, "Bang & Boogie," they begin to fist pump – yes, fist pump – and encourage the audience to do the same. Suddenly we are transformed from a small Portland venue to the Jersey Shore, and it’s an unwelcome occurrence. The frat boy types who have been lurking at the edges of the dance floor join in, and it becomes a festival of clenched fists swooping every which way. My exact notes read, “Ugh, fist pump. Really? WTF.” Tanya Morgan seems so much more sophisticated than that, but I digress.
The fist pumping dies down and they perform one more song. Once it ends, they abruptly leave the stage – a move that leaves the audience making the collective face that occurs during a record brake. A 30-minute set was all too brief. The fans want more, and it appears they aren’t going to get it. They wait for an encore, but it’s not happening. The house DJ returns without Tanya Morgan, and it becomes any other dance party. The group has enough talent and material to headline a show and command a larger venue. If Tanya Morgan keeps delivering the same level of energy, that’s where they’ll be the next time they appear in Portland.
