Walking into Blueberry Hill, swarming alongside the over-glittered plasticati club-goers mingling zealously with tattooed and folically ambivalent hipster regulars, one might be struck, giggling, at this poseur tap-dance taking place over the cultural powder keg in the Duck Room beneath us.
Grinning, White Russian in hand, this writer found the way downstairs towards the legendary stage.
Tonight the bill is owned by the Delmar Kingz, whom the bartenders have been passively suggesting to fringe yupsters more interested in Jeremy Maclin's yards per reception this evening than the congregation of rap zealots.
They, conversely, are ready to hear these, their high priests, eviscerate any pretense of socioethical introspection set to tracks so sick they belong on a junkie's arm. One can only think, with bemused pity, "their loss."
The Perfect Strangers, for those of you still dozing peacefully, have been considered the standard for quality rap in St. Louis for years. Their latest album is "Life on Film."
Veteran producer/emcee Capo, possessor of one of St. Louis' most distinctively recognizable voices (think Eminem minus whatever it is you do not like about Eminem, and you are close) has been turning the blank canvases of St. Louis streets into stark reflections of our great city's viscous and often brutal ideologies without sacrificing a crucial (and effortless) ability to make the girlies get out on the dance floor and lose their minds.
His longtime partner in crime, Gage - no amateur himself on the drum machines - plays a rhyme scheme like John Coltrane played a saxophone reed.
Throw in their turntablist DJ Trog, with guest appearances by St. Louis DJ legend K-nine, and the result is hip-hop as hip-hop should be - compelling.
"This album just happened; I wish there were more of a design to it than that," Gage said after much prodding. "I'd like to think we were the type of group who could lounge around and pontificate over what Descartes, or Charlie Parker or Dostoyevsky might consider worthwhile expenditures of 'art' … but, uh … we're not.
"Those priorities don't necessarily exist for us. We see things as they really happen, [and] we relate them as such … Lies taste like a mouth full of pennies," Gage said.
Perfect Strangers' new disc, "Life on Film," is the soundtrack to a life they find unfolding around them - for better or worse.
Dedicated production mastermind SV provides half of the thematic audio, as Capo handles the rest. But in an increasingly St. Louis practice, the traditionally self-contained unit has employed various luminaries such as 40 'til 5's DJ Urban-1, and relative newcomer Domingo, in order to expand their shared vision.
Urban-1's permeating "Bless the Mic" lays an infectious framework for the emcees to do exactly that, while Domingo's "Another Way" is the aural representation of what Capo calls "Living, wishing you had everything that you needed and then suddenly realizing you have everything you need."
"Life on Film" might have taken shape so naturally that the score wrote itself more quickly than artists involved were able to even recognize its completion, but the fact remains that - agenda or no - there's finally a soundtrack fit to evoke the heat of our summers, the poured concrete of our winter skies.
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