So I went to the G-Shock 25th anniversary party last night (like a lot of other bloggers, and it’s all over the web, so I’ll try not go into too much redundant detail) with my friend Sam (as seen in the flick above, taking a break from the documentary he’s putting together on a Japanese hip-hop artist), and his man Frank, who does tiiiiiiight production, (sadly, his new newness not really repped yet on his myspace page), but be warned that he and his partner have some HEATERS headed your way. Talked to a bunch of heads at the event that would have been worth the trip alone: Eric Haze, Jamil GS, Jeff Staple, Ellen Jong, Dante Ross, the ‘next dudes’ Ricky and Dee, and of course Riko Sakurai, who invited us.

MasterBlogger™ Jeff Staple, Ellen Jong, Kanye’s ‘Mork’ Egg, O.G. style, Riko on ice

G-Shocks for 25 years, eh? Wow. I had one of the classic black ones back in the day, and I got my second one while I worked at Def Jam, a fresh yellow/grey/black one several years later from a trade with ‘Heavy Metal Scott’ Koenig for business cards for Rush Management. He’s the guy that took the pie in the face in the ‘Fight For Your Right (To Party)‘ video that everyone thinks is Rick Rubin. Nope, that was Scott. Also makes a small cameo in Tougher Than Leather. Anyway, Casio had a cool presentation from the engineer who created the G-Shock, and the guy told a pretty funny tale of creating the watch and secretly throwing prototypes out the window at various stories in his building to test it. Spike Lee was there, talked about the Knicks’ so-necessary new direction when taken off the topic of G-Shocks by a question from the crowd. Haze spoke too, on the cultural globe growing smaller thanks to the internet. Then there was the wait for the Kanye show.

Finally West started, and despite my senses being beaten down by the Glaw-in-the-Durrrk show the night before, I found the show very entertaining, with Kanye delivering verses in a casual, direct style from a ‘modpod’ chair with his band lurking in the dark - no glowing allowed, it seems. And then you’ve heard about the dancing women, correct? The nude women? I mean, plexiglass space-helmets and some panties? Spacy! Badonkarella. Willo tells me Kanye wanted to take the whole tour 18 and over. He kicked a decent freestyle about forgetting a verse and integrated how some dude was trying to pass to him business card. He ended the show with a quick “Thanks to G-Shock” and that was it. Casio definitely got their money’s worth - West put together a full show, a show only upstaged by his own tour show the night before, and that was only in magnitude - with the exception of a rendition of ‘Stronger’ that felt out of place, this Casio show was a better fit for his songs. He’s in top form right now, and this smaller venue coaxed the smoothest, most natural flow I’ve ever heard from him with his lyrics. The ’stadium’ shit is cool, but the lyrics start getting shouted and I don’t hear him as a M.O.P.-style dude. And while I took us there, anyone else notice how big this word ’stadium’ is in hip-hop right now? Keep your eyes open, let’s talk.

I had a ‘yellow’ wrist G-Shock band on my invite, and at the end of the night, when I hit the ‘gift bag’ tent, I found it was only good for a t-shirt! Whaaaaat? Faded! Surrounded by huge groups of girls and dudes all carrying boxes with free G-Shock watches within! Became hard to stomach; my collector’s OCD was kicking in. MUST HAVE, and I didn’t. However, while sulking away from the event, I found a discarded red wrist band on top of a pile of trash - the red one was the key to getting the watch box instead of just a t-shirt, and apparently someone left before the schwag was flowing, because you can be sure the moment they handed you a watch-in-a-box they stripped the red band off your arm. I headed back to the tent and got my 25th Anniversary watch. Breathing easy, I headed south.

I had mentioned seeing the Kanye West tour the night before, thanks to the fine people at BBC/Startrak, Loic and Phillip. It’s an amazing show, definitely on that “Ziggy Stardust/Captain Eo/suspend-your-disbelief-as-Kanye-pretends-to-talk-to-a-computer” level that you’ve heard about. But I’ve seen it twice now, and while combining ‘exciting’ and ‘long’ sounds great, imagine watching all the Star Wars movies in one night or ordering three milkshakes. It’s a full event, and there’s so little room for improvisation or mistakes that it’s pretty much the same thing every night. Don’t get me wrong - you should see it if you can. But maybe not the tour to go all ‘deadhead’ on. (On a side note: without a tinge of hate, Jeff Staple astutely commented to me that “nothing actually glows.”) The tour has improved musically - all acts are tighter. The ‘Journey’ song that Kanye drops in the last part of his show is now performed by his band, as opposed the original recording of “Don’t Stop Believing” that was played in Los Angeles, an odd decision that my personal jury is still out on… Love the song, strange feeling about hearing it dropped in the final act of Kanye’s show. The live band playing it made more sense. But for every grumpy critic in the house, there were 1000+ venetian-blind-glasses-wearing teens loving that shit. Hip-Hop has come a long way. I’m glad it’s Kanye at this level.

Some highlights for me were running into my man Devon, aka Devo Springsteen, who I met at jury duty many years back, the man who put together the ’stadium-style’ anthem from Kanye’s last album, ‘Diamonds (from Sierra Leone),‘ and seeing the t-shirts that I designed for the N.E.R.D. tour for the first time since I sent off the illustrator files - sorry for the sloppy pic, but it was hectic.

Shirts ‘N’ and ‘O’, there are two more not shown here, unfortch (did I just take a second to figure out how to spell that?)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 15:08 and is filed under hip-hop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.