A&E
IMF brings Pell to Barn
By Alex Witonsky ’17
May 7, 2015
Last Friday night, the Independent Music Fund invited Pell, an up-and-coming rapper hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana for Late Nite in the Barn. Surrounding a small stage in the front of the barn, the student turnout was small, but mostly energetic for a time.
In the last year, the College has had a shortage of sly-linguists, or those among the musical youth who are known for being smithies of beats and weavers of words. It is a little over one year ago today that Vic Mensa, a Chicago rapper in cahoots with the region’s sensational Chance The Rapper, played in the Sadove basement to a crowd of about 150. So, from the outset, the 21-year old Pell seemed like a good get.
For many hip-hop heads, Pell follows in the wake of Chance the Rapper, who is known for an energetic delivery that charts somewhere at the sonic intersection of spoken word, boom-bap rhymey rap and sing-song. Pell has a similar tendency to wax melodic and pseudo-croon, with the key difference being Pell’s affinity for rap that has an East Coast vibe: a style distinct from The Dirty South’s brand of rap.
Some have even gone so far as to pigeonhole Pell’s aesthetic as “Dream Rap,” or rap that sets the artist’s aspirations against their origin making use of sleepy, synthetic soundscapes. Personally, the movement seems a bit silly, for most rappers have repped their hometown in one way or another and played around with beats and samples that sound anesthetized or dreamy. Artists like Meek Mill (I’m thinking of records like Dream Chasers 1-3, Dreams Are Worth More Than Money and Dreams and Nightmares), Zev Love-X, Jay-Z and members of OF could all have fit this bill at some point in their recording careers.
Pell put on a good show with music from Floating While Dreaming, his release from last spring. He paced the stage wide-eyed, milking those vertical rap-hand-gesticulations and using them as a sort of visualizer to the beat. The crowd was divided into three distinct factions: those dancing in the front, the slightly less energetic headboppers in the middle row and those cell phone-anxious out-of-place-looking people milling around the back. For three quarters of the show Pell made heavy eye contact with the front row, providing all the typical rap show cues. They worked, and the crowd seemed into it, but Pell seemed locked in auto-pilot, disinterested and disengaged.
For the last bit of the show the lights were turned on (I don’t know why or whose idea this was) and Pell moved off-stage, setting up an odd little dance-circle. It was a little goofy, but for the most part everyone was having a lot of fun. Pell’s DJ was bobbing his head and grinning.
At the end of the night, it was clear that the IMF had put on another great show.