Lyrical’s birthday bash, Harpers Ferry, January 10, 2007
By MATTHEW M. BURKE | January 17, 2007
With its tradition of blues and jam bands, Allston’s Harpers Ferry isn’t the first place you’d expect one of Boston’s most promising hip-hop artists to celebrate his birthday. But times have changed, and a week ago Wednesday it indeed was Harpers Ferry that played host to the Lyrical birthday bash, a party/show to celebrate one more year in the life of the Lowell-bred rapper.
Clad in a sport coat and a button-down shirt, Lyrical took a break from mingling in the crowd to announce that he is “forever 29.” The tall and skinny enigma of a rapper (a/k/a Pete Plourde, by day a business-management and mathematics professor) is the first to admit with a smile that he was also 29 last year and will still be 29 in 10 years. “If Sylvester Stallone can be 50 when he’s 60, I can be 29 when I’m 59. I got an album called iNFiNiTi. . . it’s timeless.”
Inspired by hip-hop’s golden era, Lyrical emerged as the voice of X-Caliber in the late ’90s, and he did a stint in the group Invasion before going solo. iNFiNiTi (D.i.M.E.) dropped in ’05 and was voted Album of the Year in last June’s first annual Mass Industry Committee Hip-Hop Awards. He plans to keep pushing the disc (available on iTunes and Rhapsody, as well as at Underground Hip-Hop on Huntington Avenue) till August of 2008, when he’ll release a follow-up.
At Harpers, Lyrical freestyled about the Big Dig and Saddam Hussein and performed only a couple of iNFiNiTi tracks with backing from the mellow jazz/funk quartet Velvet Stylus. But he shared the spotlight by inviting a group of racially diverse MCs to join him on stage for a freestyle symphony of everything from gangsta rap to suburban backpack rhymes before slipping off stage and back into the crowd. That left Rebel Love, Chaos, Doe Boy, Metaphorick, and Carbon on stage to trade bars over the Wu-Tang classic “C.R.E.A.M.” and Capleton’s “Wings of the Morning,” with grooves by Velvet Stylus.
And Harpers Ferry general manager Andrew Wolan? The 27-year-old sat at the back bar working on his laptop. “I love hip-hop,” he enthused. “We try to do a lot more hip-hop to help the scene grow.” It certainly seemed to be doing the trick for 29-year-old Lyrical.
Related:
N.W.A., Big business, Boston Hip-Hop Unity Fest 2010, More 
- N.W.A.
Twenty years later, Straight Outta Compton holds up better than most of the East Coast albums released around the same time.
- Big business
Now that the music biz has licked its wounds from a nasty 2005, things are finally starting to heat up, and an indie-heavy winter is giving way to a more major spring.
- Boston Hip-Hop Unity Fest 2010
An optimist would say that, despite some serious disappointments, last year’s Third Annual Boston Hip-Hop Unity Fest demonstrated just how peaceful the Bean rap scene really is.
- Skill ride
All it took was a Godzilla sample and a simple, forceful “Simon says get the fuck up” for Pharoahe Monch to leave his mark on hip-hop history.
- Bow Wow
From its Illmatic -quoting cover to its boasts of “money stacks taller than the Empire State,” 2005’s Wanted was Bow Wow’s coming-of-age album, an opportunity for a youngster known to most listeners as a kiddie-pop novelty to prove himself a rapper worth considering alongside grown-up MCs.
- Hip-hop history interview and podcast
Authors Jeff Chang and Brian Coleman talk about the latest wave of hip-hop criticism.
- Five jewels in the Rubin crown
Since launching the pioneering rap label Def Jam out of his NYU dorm room, Rubin has threaded his fingers through almost every genre, from the dirty boogie of the Black Crowes to the metal of Danzig to the pop ephemera of God Lives Underwater to, well, Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash.
- Hits and missus
Give you a hint: one of them sizzled, one of them fizzled. Live grime’s a bitch, innit? The Streets and Lady Sovereign at Avalon, June 21, 2006
- Lloyd Banks
Lloyd Banks has officially followed G-Unit leader 50 Cent into sophomore mediocrity.
- Mad scientists
Successful hip hop is all about braggadocio.
- Reks in effect
Since jumping skills-first onto Boston’s rap scene seven years ago, Lawrence-born MC Reks has earned a variety of reputations.
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music, More
, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music, Saddam Hussein, Sylvester Stallone, Andrew Wolan, Pete Plourde, Less
