Black Milk and his band treats Chicago to some "real hip-hop"

November 16, 2010, at Reggie's

By Clayton Purdom
Published: November 19th, 2010 | 7:00am

I arrived at Black Milk’s vaunted “live band” show at Reggie’s with a dose of dubiousness. DJ Sye Young spun the hits at a mind-boggling tempo, jerking between DMX and downtempo chart-pop a millisecond before anyone could start to nod their heads to either. Onstage were allayed keyboards, drums, and a mysterious amplifier. Black Milk took the stage, thankfully sans opening acts, with little fanfare to an appreciative crowd. My arms were crossed.

Here’s why: Hip-hop never needed a live band. I’ve seen the best rappers of my generation reduced to howling 6-minute guitar solos, faux-punk headbanging, beats turned to mushy keyboard soft rock, drums turned to Carter Beauford windchime-rustling. Hip-hop doesn’t need this. It’s an obvious put-on, but unlike most hip-hop put-ons it signifies not realness but properness. It’s a move toward a legitimacy that two turntables and a microphone already gracefully flaunts.

Furthermore, Milk is a producer’s producer, a devout Dilla disciple who, like most producers, raps with a furious inferiority complex, spitting a sort of doubletime battle-rap flow that singlemindedly focuses on how he’s overlooked. On triumphant hip-hop records like the keyboard fantasia Tronic or this year’s furiously tight Album of the Year, his emceeing is best seen as a complement to the production, something steady overlaying the fascinatingly complex music underneath. I hesitated to give this emcee center stage. I envisioned a capella freestyles.

Quickly—within a couple shattering, thunderous, hands-up minutes—I realized I was wrong. What might be the most subversive thing in Black Milk’s career thus far is this, a complete resuscitation of the live hip-hop band. It’d be unfair to call his trio of keyboardist, drummer and bassist a complement to the DJ, because they shared a neat improvisatory interplay of their own, dropping out with a nod between each other and roaring back to life with another nod from Milk. Indeed, he proved to be a remarkably gregarious frontman, eschewing a lot of hip-hop’s most tired stage moves—the enforced rap-along, the sermon on “real hip-hop”—for a role as a flywheel. He didn’t rap over drums, he rapped to them: as neat a metaphor for his albums’ appeal as I can envision. When momentous drops came (and with this band they were seismic) they came as self-contained triumphs, not as mere accompaniment to a good rhyming couplet. The live band wasn’t a ploy to showcase Black Milk as an artiste or auteur, they were meant to make the beats hit harder. At this they succeeded.

A lover of great emceeing above anything else, I hesitate to laud this too much. What I want, and have always wanted, is for Milk to find either an elastic emcee like CL Smooth or a muse like Guru and to go savant. What I learned from his live performance is that that won’t happen, and that that’s fine. Black Milk is a traditionalist, but the producer-emcee paradigm I was trying to fit him into was the wrong one. His lineage is that of the Detroit hellraiser: I saw the Stooges’ ruthless efficacy, Motown passion and sweat, Dilla at his dopest but also Dilla at his weirdest, the L.A. years, bugged out. By God, this traditionalist is doing his own thing.

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