Langerado: Rap’s Rock ’n’ Role Models

By Julia Reidy and Steve LaBate

The Paste booth at Langerado looks out on an expansive field crisscrossed by strolling festival-goers and flanked by a Jerry Garcia art museum, hemp-clothing vendors and South Florida alt-weekly New Times. The latter is inexplicably employing an overworked smoke machine and blasting bad techno at the expense of the much more appealing audio coming from The Roots, who are onstage performing their collective asses off some 400 yards in front of us on a balmy Friday evening. Night has fallen and our lights are out. The power cord supplying us with the juice to illuminate our stacks of magazines and to transport these blogs to you has shorted out. We sit in the involuntarily dimmed lights of what suddenly seems like a movie theater—which is actually good, because The Roots are cinematic if any band ever was. The stage, from across the field is a dazzling symphony of blue lights and artificial smoke; green and yellow streaks painting the swamp air. Amidst the deep soul and funk, a sousaphone—played by Damon “Tuba Gooding Jr.” Bryson—emerges, waggling and bobbing across the stage. It’s the only visual representation, from this distance, of the verbal melee going on between the stage’s metal uprights and speaker banks.

In the middle of the set, The Roots remind us why they’re one of the most daring and innovative groups in the hip-hop world, slipping into a trippy take on Dylan’s “Masters of War” set to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Before long, ?uestlove, Black Thought and co. abandon the National Anthem but continue with the Dylan tune, loping along with appropriate menace. Ten minutes later, The Roots segue slyly into Hendrix’s Vietnam-era classic “Machine Gun.” The staccato drum fills explode like fully automatic assault rifles, and the pulsing guitars blast from the stage, rapid sonic laser waves homing in on our helpless eardrums. Continuing to pound away at the kit, ?uestlove leads the charge through a sped-up arrangement of the band’s collaboration with soul savant Cody ChesnuTT, “The Seed (2.0).” The musicianship of the band—playing as they always do, with live instruments rather than relying heavily on sampling or a DJ’s beat—is vastly impressive. Not only can the Roots battle anyone in rap, but they can take the fight to rock ’n’ roll’s best with shock-and-awe force.

Q: SO WHAT’CHA WHAT’CHA WHAT’CHA WANT? A: LESS NONDESCRIPT JAM-FUNK!

By Steve LaBate

As we trudge across the now slightly muddied festival grounds after the Roots’ set, we can hear the Beastie Boys laying down some of the porn-funky instrumentals from their last record. Interesting textures unfold from the Everglades Stage’s massive speaker columns, but after four or five consecutive instrumentals, it becomes obvious that the band is playing to the jam-centric crowd. Finally, breaking the monotony, the aging but able Beasties deliver a pumped rendition of “Root Down.” Next, a lead-pipe heavy Black Sabbath sample kicks in for “Rhymin and Stealin.” Deeper into the set, it’s striking how deftly and tastefully the Beastie Boys recycle old-school horn and flute lines, and it’s clear that the flow of Mike D, MCA and Ad-Roc is as strong as ever.

Rather than the usual shoddy jumbo-tron footage you see at most mega-concerts, Langerado has stepped it up and hired what seems like relatively skilled cinematographers shooting with almost movie-quality gear. The Beasties work the stage and add a heavy dose of funkiness to their arrangements; it’s Night of The Living Wah-Wahs up there. Between songs, the band talks about how great it is to be performing together after several months of concert hiatus.

After a more energetic segment, the band slips in a few more instrumentals, many of which—when you stop clamoring for a “Brass Monkey” or “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”—are actually fairly interesting, especially the ones that lean more toward authentic Isaac Hayes jams than Phish-esque semi-funk. One of the former morphs slowly into what sounds like hypnotic Tibetan monk chanting. But then the band starts catering to the jamband crowd again, stretching out for 10-20 minutes of slowly unraveling, hook-less grooves. Just as I’m getting narcoleptic again, the band harks back to its ripping punk-rock roots. Mix Master Mike keeps it fresh, following with a turntable/scratch fest that works the crowd into an apeshit frenzy, before “Body Movin’” begins thumping loudly in the Florida night, with any luck floating across the miles and time back to all those zombified Miami bassheads of the ’80s.

There’s a familial vibe onstage, with plenty of sarcastic banter, inside jokes and laughter—after all these guys have been at it for over 25 years.

Set closer “So What’cha Want” sets the crowd bouncing and swaying, and after a brief break, Mix Master Mike returns to the stage for the encore, with opening lines of “Intergalactic Planetary.” Many in the crowd charge forward about 10-15 feet as the song begins, causing a momentary panic, but everyone settles in and is fine as far as I can tell. Next on, “Ch-Check It Out,” the MCs shout, “Where’s that place where we work it out—In the Glades! In the Glades!”

There’s an unexpected break to fix some technical problems on stage, and fan-favorite “Sabotage” is still plagued by sound glitches, but by the time the main fuzz-bass line kicks in the second time around there’s no stopping the Beasties’ momentum.