A$AP Rocky with Schoolboy Q and Danny Brown – Sunshine Theater (Albuquerque, NM) – Wednesday, October 31, 2012

October 22: Kendrick Lamar releases good kid, m.A.A.d city, plans to play Albuquerque the next day (with pals Ab-Soul and Jay Rock), doesn’t.

October 31: A$AP Rocky plans to release LongLiveA$AP, plays Albuquerque instead.¹

November 6: Election Day.

¹ Everyone was talking about Kendrick Lamar. We were there to see A$AP Rocky and friends, but the world’s imagination was elsewhere. Outside the venue, a young man kept repeating, “Bitch, don’t kill my vibe,” Lamar’s mantra for the creative act that birthed good kid, greeted by many the week before as an instant classic. Inside, Lamar’s colleague Schoolboy Q invoked the album of the moment, and said something about being more interested in blasting it, then and there, than in playing any of his own songs. (I envisioned the concert turning into a listening party, but that didn’t happen.) When A$AP Rocky ended the night with a handful of shout-outs, his pronouncement of Lamar’s name seemed especially heartfelt. And an event organizer took the stage with good news: Lamar’s cancelled appearance in Albuquerque the previous week had been rescheduled for December. Don’t shoot the too ingratiating messenger, not when his message is so rapturously received.

Still, everyone worked hard to shake their distraction, and the show eventually reached the kind of hermetic bliss that new artists who deserve their fans can often conjure. After his eventful entrance, A$AP Rocky struck an inaugural pose with such awesome confidence I could hardly believe it possible. Bending forward at the front of the stage, with one foot on a monitor and one arm extended to the mic stand, he held the pose, letting us imagine it as an iconic photograph. He maybe wanted to be admired, a little bit, but he was too hard to catch, looking out, reversing the gaze, overwhelming our scrutiny with his own. Certainly, it was as if he, and not Lamar, had just brought something amazing into the world.

And he had, in a way, moments before. Against a painted backdrop in which soldiers raise an upside-down black-and-white American flag, framed by a big orange sun and a sky full of helicopters, three men emerged, two wearing gas masks flanking a much shorter masked man. The small man removed his mask and… it was A$AP Rocky! What this was all supposed to signify, beyond a pulpy fantasia on America’s military past, I can’t say, and the meaning was further erased, not recorded, by the sea of cell phones trying to capture it. Or maybe these helped amplify our era’s vapor lock of meaning, where random signs portend a spectacle but not of any particular kind? But who cares, because underneath all the pomp and circumstance, the message was clear: What A$AP Rocky had to deliver was himself. During his set’s interludes, Vietnam-era rock ‘n’ roll (“Purple Haze,” most appropriately) played underneath a narrative voiceover that told the story, piece by piece, of Rocky on a path of discovery, first finding other men named A$AP (now known as his A$AP Mob), and then a sense of belonging, and then the power to bring his sound to the world. And finally, one has to assume, an audacious way to frame it. His exit music? “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

After the big entrance, all the loudness cleared out, and A$AP Rocky remained alone onstage, commencing the warm-up, the getting-to-know-you, the best part of his set, shouting out Clams Casino and giving the production of “Wassup” its due (one of the show’s rare calm and purely aural moments). His songs with A$AP Mob were more bombastic, sometimes indecipherable, but he takes his membership in the group seriously, it was clear, and more often than not conceded the spotlight to the other A$APs. Schoolboy Q joined him for “Brand New Guy,” after which the two men sat down on the stage (pretty much out of my sight, but cross-legged, I like to imagine) and talked about where that night’s weed was going to come from. I can hardly ever believe that anyone would choose to play Albuquerque, so perhaps by default it seemed, throughout most of the show, that the only reason these guys had come to town was for the local weed. Of Schoolboy Q, I don’t feel familiar enough to say a lot, but I think I learned that in the title of his latest album, Habits & Contradictions, the habits refer to marijuana and the contradictions refer to the fact that no one else in modern music creates such an appealingly democratic and optimistic vibe (except for Big K.R.I.T.) and yet has so much bad shit in his past to inspire the opposite. He talked about his days of being homeless and unshowered, and seemed pleased to imagine his audience as being full of poor people. Of the accuracy of his impression, again I can only guess.

(When he asked where his New Mexican fans were in the audience, he returned their response with thanks for “supporting my music.” Later, A$AP Rocky was more straightforward about what that support means, thankful for having fans and a career despite having “nothing commercial available.”)

Both men played generous sets, but I caught a mere 17 minutes of Danny Brown, who inspired the majority of the dollars of my ticket purchase. (I entered the venue seven minutes after the scheduled start time, so he couldn’t have done more than 24 minutes, total.) But call him the epitome of a new super-efficient era in rap music, because 17 minutes of Danny Brown is as well spent as 17 minutes of anyone I can name. His biggest song to date, called “Radio Song,” is just over two minutes, and as the highlight of his live set, it seemed even shorter and more eventful. The song’s sparse, ear-wormy backing track was gone, crushed under the bass-heavy homogeneity of the night entire, but the simple beat remained, and “Radio Song” is nothing if not a stark showcase for a rapper with a beautiful voice and cutting words. He ended with “Blunt After Blunt,” which might be the musical nadir of his fantastic XXX (its string of blunts must be adjectives, not nouns, because there’s zero finesse in the song’s hook, made all the more apparent when Brown had the audience handle its deadly, bludgeoning articulation), but works anyway, because it’s also the narrative and/or thematic nadir. Brown left the stage as the song’s instrumental track droned on, and there was something unplanned, I’m sure, in the suddenness of his early exit.

But it was no fault of the responsive crowd, which was very familiar with XXX. As well as I think I know an album, I’m always startled to learn there are hundreds of people, in the same town where I live, who have internalized and memorized it much more thoroughly. Do I catch them at the one concert they’ve attended all year long, or are they like this everywhere they go, more ravenous listeners than I imagine myself to be? Whatever the case, I think Danny Brown’s “I Will” is the greatest oral sex song ever written, and maybe the most sincere song ever written about promises made and kept, but I couldn’t keep up with a crowd who seemed able to speak every thirsty, uninhibited line along with Brown. That he performed his ode to cunnilingus while wearing a black cotton sack dress made it all the more a shining example of unselfconscious sexual expression. I can’t say if his wardrobe was part of a Halloween costume or just a further example of his adventures in style, but he wore his dress too comfortably, almost invisibly, to make it much of a question. Later, he reemerged during A$AP Rocky’s set with the addition of a leather jacket, and any doubts about his fashion sense vanished. He’s an exhilarating performer (I smiled the whole time), too, but when the crowd’s energy peaked significantly later in the night, during Schoolboy Q and A$AP Rocky, I could see in hindsight that Brown was far from this show’s center, and has some work to do before he can recreate the center at the place where he is.

But, why? That was on my endless list of unanswered questions, when the show ended. Also: Was that really Ab-Soul who joined A$AP Rocky for one song? (It looked a lot like him.) And if so, why didn’t he also join Danny Brown for his performance of the excellent “Terrorist Threats,” Ab-Soul’s own song on which Brown is merely the guest star? Why, when Schoolboy Q said he really wanted to play something from Lamar’s new album, did he instead play “A.D.H.D.”, from last year’s Section.80? And so on. Being able to ask these questions will have to be enough for now, because the awesome blare of a show like this one will keep you from picking up any details you didn’t already sort of know.