Souls Of Mischief, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien & Zzyzx

Take some of the coolest reggae groups and hip hop acts around, throw in a bunch of ravers, breakers, and Rastafarians, and what do you have? This year’s Renegade Festival, an annual mountain bash held in Quincy. Who would have thought of combining reggae and rap, you ask? Well if you think about it, it makes perfect sense because reggae is music that which the artist is expressing their innermost thoughts on topics such as love, government, and spiritual beliefs. Now take hip-hop music, for example some of these rappers are trying to convey some of these same messages but over beats and samples woven around metaphors and other crazy wordplays. I can go on for days about all the amazingly cool bands that graced the Renegade stages, but due to the space of this review and consumption of drugs I took I’ll narrow it down to three bands.

The second night of the festival proved to be the highlight of the whole weekend. As me and my friends sat outside waiting to get into the big red barn that looked much like a hangar from a science fiction flick, we were surprised to find out that they (the promoters of the show) were charging an extra 5 bills to get into the show. Now this wasn’t sitting too pretty with the breakers and ravers with high heads waiting to get into the show. Nonetheless they managed to bum rush the stage, and needless to say the promoters just figured either they deal with charging all these kids or let the show go on. The kids won this one and the show went on.

Actually the first performer to go on was some flustered old man that jumped on Colby from Zzyzx‘s keyboards and started doing his best impression of a inebriated Barry Manilow. The kids got a big kick out of this silly old man which some how segued into Zzyzx’s remarkable set. I’ve seen this band perform a few times but this night these kids were hot. It was kinda silly that the promoters decided to have them set up their gear in front of the stage, but like I said earlier, nothing really seemed to be going according to plans. That seemed to be all right with this band because this enabled them to be right in these kids’ faces whilst the crowd was breaking around the band in true b-boy fashion. At the closing of their set they brought up JT, who is the sax player and singer of Keyser Soze, and did an ill jam session closing their set and hyping the crowd up for the headliners.

First to come onto the stage was Domino, the producer and DJ for much of Hieroglyphics’ music. He put on some crazy breakbeat album and started to hype the crowd, leading the kids into chanting ‘Hieroglyphics’ over and over. Then out of nowhere he mixed the track "That’s When Ya’ Lost" and Souls Of Mischief took the stage to an ecstatic crowd and began to assault eardrums. As soon as the first song finished Domino mixed in one of Del’s earliest singles, "Catch A Bad One" off his sophomore album "No Need For Alarm." The crowd went berserk, to say the least. I am not trying to be stereotypical or sexist in any way, but it was pretty neat to see white girls and rastas rapping along with Del to songs that are, like 5 years old. Del also managed to play a few songs off his new album, as did Souls, whose new album drops in October.

As you probably guessed, Souls took over again and did a medley of songs off their first two albums while Del sat smiling the entire time, eager to rock shock the mic once again. The passing of the mics went on for a great while, ending in a freestyle session that would make most rappers cringe while tightly clutching their book of written lyrics. They seemed to only play a good 80 or so minutes but everyone left in great spirits, and you could tell there were a lot more Hiero fans there than before they took the stage.

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