GIG REVIEW: Northern State
- Posted on March 11, 2008 1:59 PM
- 1 comment
Northern State
Koko, London
5th March 2008
Review by Matt Killeen
Can I Keep This Pen? Yes I can, it seems. I am handed a nice blue biro to review the show as the interview breaks up. It’s a shameless plug for their new album but my ballpoint has gone dry so it saves the day. I’ve just interviewed the pen owners, Northern State. They are some of New York’s finest talents, a three woman rap group and purveyors of humorous old school hip-hop. They are three great albums old. They have an unreasonable love of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. They have credentials: their admirers and producers have included Pete Rock, Cypress Hill and Adrock from the Beastie Boys. You may not be aware of them however. There are some reasons for this.
One of them was revealed when I asked them, Seatwave-style, for their favourite gig as the member of an audience. Sprout waxed lyrical about the Check Your Head era Beastie Boys, Hesta Prynn about watching the reformed Pixies. This is their generation, their inspiration. Intelligent, witty, left-wing, politically aware, hard-core. Northern State are all these things, therefore utterly unfashionable to the mainstream.
They’re also women. Women – real, creative, intelligent, ‘average’ women that is – are not tolerated well by the music industry. The mainstream music business is the archetypal patriarchy. It’s a business run by men for the convenience of men and although Women can play, they have to stick to the rules. If you’re on the outside, you’re doomed to be a peripheral figure. I asked Northern State about this and they described what sounded like a bleak landscape denuded of female activity, of going ‘weeks without seeing another woman’.
Northern State are, by their own admission, difficult to categorise. They are too hard for the Just Jack crowd and they lack the dark self destructive cynicism of The Streets. They are too politically aware to conform to the mire of bling and bitches besetting hip-hop and rap. They don’t fit and weirdly enough they’re proud of it. They aren’t downbeat about their lack of success and are genuinely content that they can afford to make music at all, even if they have to sell their gear on ebay every now and then to make ends meet. Featuring on the soundtrack of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, twice, is enough validation.
So they arrive unheralded in the UK, managing to tour the country with not one mention in the national press. I can’t help feeling like a one-man fanbase.
I really want Northern State to ROCK. I am, however, uncertain if they will. This is not just my natural taciturn outlook. Northern State have not toured the UK for over five years and I have yet to see them. Live hip hop can be an unfulfilling experience acoustically, especially for a support act. They are also nice, friendly people. Can you really rock da house if you aren’t Bud swilling frat boys?
Also, I seem to be the only man in the room. Northern State are special guests of Canadian identical twin songstresses Tegan and Sarah and their fanbase is teenage, female and possibly predominantly lesbian. This is a sell-out crowd of fourteen year olds in army boots, asymmetrical hair cuts and a low slung cargo pants who have been queuing in sleeping bags outside. Tegan and Sarah are...gentle. What will this crowd think of NSP in full effect? Normally I’d be thrilled to be surrounded by lesbians, like a Tuesday night at The Candy Bar. Tonight on the other hand I’m tired and ill, only a few weeks out of hospital. I am feeling oppressed. Unless I anaesthetise myself with alcohol I might not even make it to their stage time. There’s only one seat and I am jealously guarding it.
I am not thinking this through correctly however. I spend so long railing at the inequalities of the music world that I fail to spot an oasis amongst the desert of casual misogyny. The women, straight and gay, who are in the audience tonight will take Northern State ‘seriously’, not as I take them ‘seriously’ but as in ‘without prejudice’. This is where women CAN rock. All Northern State have to do is be good.
...and they are good, very good – building from the diversity of their new album and playing as a three piece they manage to be both entertaining and intelligent without ever being smug. ILUVWHENYA is a tale of passion and sex from a female perspective, untainted by traditional male signifiers, wrapped in a persistent rhythm and pop sensibility.
I am...aroused. Good work.
In front of a screaming crowd of young women it all makes perfect sense. ‘Girl for all seasons’ sounds like the rallying cry it is, even if they have to explain what ‘Girls Gone Wild’ is. They ooze charisma. They play the crowd well, with the easy professionalism of a band that lives on the road. They also play with the crowd, at least the lesbian part of it, with the easy skill of women who are comfortable with themselves and their sexuality. They are unquestionably ‘hot’ in a way that only empowered, thinking women can be. That is, without exploitation or objectivity. They pass any test I could set them, not that they’d care.
I had asked them what was playing on the tourbus. They were sad to report that the crew weren’t allowing ‘Greys...’ or the ‘O.C.’, their self confessed trashy pleasures. Afterwards at the T-shirt stall Hesta Prynn steals over to me and has a confession.
“I listen with headphones in my bunk on the bus. I’m listening to some old stuff. I’m really into Pearl Jam at the moment. Is that really bad?” She whispers, leaning in.
Compared to the O.C? How little she knows me.
Stay tuned for our Northern State interview.
Related links:
Northern State concert tickets.
Northern State MySpace.
Northern State official site
Comments (1)
emily
i went to that gig! when they came on, i have to admit my first reaction was "wtf, white female rappers? kill me now" but by the time they finished their set i was completely in love with them! and i got hesta's signature on my arm!
Posted on March 11, 2008 9:59 PM
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