When I first heard that Rjd2, one of the most inspired hip-hop producers of the last decade, was forsaking his turntables to form a live band, the first thing I thought of was how goofy Michael Jordan looked in his White Sox uniform.
When His Airness retired from basketball (for the first time), he announced that he would be pursuing a career in professional baseball. Like RJ, MJ gave up a successful career in one discipline to develop his skills in a similar but basically different pursuit, and like RJ, his move shocked many of his fans.
I thought about it more, though, and I discovered some flaws in my comparison. Baseball requires a particular skill set that Jordan, a good athlete to be sure but not at all a well-trained baseball player, simply did not have. As a ridiculously successful producer and turntablist, RJ already has the ear for subtlety, arrangement skills and directorial panache that a good bandleader needs. Add to that his high school background in basic keyboard skills and composition, and on paper, Rjd2's little experiment seems more likely to succeed than Jordan's first did.
Remembering Jordan's "baseball career" (.202 batting average, 11 errors for the Birmingham Barons) and having experienced Rjd2's new musical direction live, I am convinced that Rjd2 is now the Michael Jordan of independent music. Minor differences aside, the basic formula is the same: Guy who excels at one craft takes time away from it to pursue another craft that he fails at. Having seen what Rjd2 and his band are capable of, it is clear that my calculations were wrong: This guy sucks at making music with a band.
Backed by a three-piece of drums, bass and keys, RJ spent the bulk of the show center stage behind a microphone with a guitar around his neck. It was a weird position for a DJ used to scurrying behind a table, cueing records on four turntables and fiddling with a state-of-the-art sampler, and he definitely looked uncomfortable. At first, I chalked up my staggering displeasure with the music to the discomfort of getting used to seeing one of my favorite DJs clumsily saddled with a guitar and looking like a rock star's little brother playing dress-up.
But the more I saw of his set, which was comprised largely of songs from 2007's live-band debut "The Third Hand," the harder it became for me to deny that the reason I didn't like the music was because it sucked - horribly. Standing still in the middle of the sold-out floor, I imagined what I would have done if I didn't know that Rjd2 was in the band onstage. Would I have booed? Lewdly heckled? Would I have shouted "Free Bird!" until someone with a lot of tattoos, even more muscles, and a Boston accent poured PBR on me and kicked my ass?
Ultimately, I decided that I wouldn't have done anything because I would have assumed they were some kind of student band playing for an Amnesty International rally, and it would have been rude of me to antagonize such do-gooders. Had I seen this band under circumstances that didn't involve 20 of my own dollars and a night of my life, I would have simply overlooked the faceless, insipid, low-level power-pop and waited until the real band took the stage.
Indeed, without the name recognition of their bandleader, a band as toothlessly boring as RJ and the D2's would never be headlining a show at a place like the Middle East. In a far cry from his crunching, beat-heavy production, live-band songs like "Have Mercy" and "Sweet Piece" have no galvanizing rhythmic backbone, no when-all-else-fails-just-nod-your-head core to at least pretend to like. With stale keys, lukewarm guitars, and trite, uninteresting lyrics sung in RJ's cringingly unpolished falsetto, it could have been any group of reasonably trained musicians who have heard The Zombies on stage, and I am still struggling to accept that this band was playing songs written by one of this millennium's most adored hip-hop visionaries.
You get the feeling that even he knows his experiment has failed. He tried playing old DJ tunes like "Ghostwriter" and "Chicken-Bone Circuit" with his band, and though the old-meets-new formula was better than any of the new songs by themselves, it still sounded soggy, amorphous and worse than it would have had he just spun the records. Graciously, RJ performed a few remnants from his fabled DJ routines, recreating the retro-funk hip-hop beauty of tracks like "The Horror," "Smoke and Mirrors," and "Good Times Roll PT. 2" from 2002's masterpiece "Deadringer." It is worth noting that the DJ bits were by far the most rousing parts of the show.
It's telling when the audience response to an artist's old material drowns out their response to the new. His DJ set felt, to his credit, like he was throwing a bone to the capacity crowd that bought tickets to see him play songs from his universally panned album, as if he had accepted the limitations of his new project, understood that no one really liked it, and delivered what people actually came to see.
As a fan of Rjd2 the DJ, I was pleased to see that the turntablery is still alive and well in his repertoire, but perhaps even more assuring is the fact that the Bulls won three NBA championships after Jordan quit baseball. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, despite the unlistenable direction Rjd2's music has taken, there will be a reason to see him perform sometime in the future. I sure hope so.
Mikey Goralink is a sophomore majoring in American studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu.
