WHAT GOES through your mind when the words rap or hip hop are mentioned? Images of guns, scantily clad women, and lyrics boasting about wealth and sexual prowess?
That is true of commercial hip hop, but with any kind of music you have to ditch the mainstream and look to the outskirts and the underground to find the really good stuff.
If you have never experienced such hip hop before then you need to see Sage Francis and Buck 65 when they come to Galway next month. If you know your alternative hip hop, it’s a good bet you be among the first in the door.
Buck 65 and Sage Francis play the Róisín Dubh as part of this year’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Buck 65 plays on Friday April 15 at 8pm and Sage Francis on Saturday 16 at 9pm.
Sage Francis has been described by Pitchfork as “a bizzarro-world Eminem, his voice low instead of high; using his ramifying metaphors and serpentine rhyming schemes to decry cultural decline”; while Drowned in Sound said “his talents seemingly know no bounds”.
“In the hip hop world I am a dissenter,” declared the Canadian rapper Buck 65 when I interviewed him in 2007, and it is true, given how his music mixes country, Americana, French chanson, and blues.
“I try to challenge convention, and myself, and what people expect of me,” he said. “There are lots of people who aren’t interested in hip-hop but I want to challenge you and prove you wrong and show you hip hop can do the things you say it can’t.”
Tickets are €18/16 for Buck 65 and €24/22 for Sage Francis. A ticket for admission to both shows is €30. Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and www.roisindubh.net
