A dazzling stagecoach worthy of Times Square announced the Essence Music Festival's fresh era Friday in the Superdome. Gone were the old Essence logo, curtain and gossamer decor, replaced by flashing vertical and horizontal LED screens and local DJ Soul Sister spinning old school vinyl between acts.
The main stage face-lift was the to the highest degree obvious change instituted by the new regime at Essence Communications led by president Michelle Ebanks and a new festival manufacturer, Rehage Entertainment. Elsewhere, Essence felt identical much like Essence, from the rainbow hue of fabrics haggard by the sharply polished crowd to the olfactory perception of deep-fried soul food in the superlounges.
Notes from Essence '08:
Rap is infinitely more than compelling onstage when it involves a live band. Kanye West's typeset with a deejay at the 2005 Essence underwhelmed. But this year, backed by a black- and helmet-clad band, he was absolutely galvanising.
The constraints of festival logistics meant he couldn't deploy the spaceship from his electric current "Glow in the Dark" tour. It wasn't necessary. For more than than an hour, he stalked the stage in a fighter's crouch, working hard from the opening "Good Morning."
He crammed an unreasonable amount of words into the dramatic "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" and toyed with a remix of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop." Synthesizers invested "Can't Tell Me Nothing" with menace. "Gold Digger" rocked. Massive, kabuki-style drums thundered in the martial stomp of "Jesus Walks" and powered an audience call-and-response in "Good Life."
Under a single spotlight, he slowed down briefly to sing "Hey Mama," a song that has pretended additional poignancy since his mother's unexpected passing. "No one lavatory say I don't do my job on this ... stage," West declared at his set's conclusion. No argument there.
Rihanna didn't let a short arrange and the 3-inch stiletto heels on her boots slow her mastered. She cavorted gamely with her dancers -- including a troupe of Robocop-style rub-board players from the future -- during a short, mettlesome set. "Don't Stop the Music" percolated with a disco pulse worthy of latter-day Madonna. Her smash "Umbrella" was an obvious crowd-pleaser.
If Chris Brown doesn't have a sponsorship deal with Japanese clothing company A Bathing Ape -- abbreviated in hip-hop circles as BAPE -- he should. He sported a shiny silver belt heave reading "BAPE" -- which, at first gear glance, could be false for "RAPE" -- then changed into a BAPE T-shirt.
In addition to advertising, he showcased the thousand-watt grin -- boyish yet arch -- the earnest, concordant, ultimately harmless mid-tempo mini-passion plays ("Yo, Excuse Me Miss," "Say Good-bye"), and the sharp steps that have earned him the moniker "the prince of R&B."
Still, he did not seem fully on his game. Momentum stalled during a too-long, fireworks-free "competition" among his troupe of 10 full-size dancers and deuce shorties. And he was reduced to mugging his way through a DJ set as the audience reveled in snippets from Prince and LL Cool J. On an Essence night observably devoid of old-school acts of the Apostles, Brown's deejay filled the gap.
Chris Rock famed that the NAACP had staged a symbolic "funeral" for the infamous n-word. "Well," he said with typical relish, "today is Easter."
Rock not only resurrected the n-word, merely the p-word, the d-word, the f-word (in all its variations) and that other f-word, the one that got actor Isaiah Washington tossed from the cast of "Grey's Anatomy." That was the final time Washington would ever so appear in so prestigious a role as sawbones, Rock noted. "Next time you control him he'll be a crackhead on 'The Wire.'"
And so it went for 65 minutes as Rock joyously ignored decorum via his trademark mix of roughshod reality and raunch. Years ago, Essence producers pulled the stopper on R&B singer R. Kelly when his show became too sexually explicit. One wonders if eyebrows were brocaded or custody wrung backstage as Rock riffed on the late Anna Nicole Smith's breasts, the politics of sex and interracial dating, or the joys of one particular oral sex act.
It wasn't all X-rated. In a lengthy political section, he skewered candidates equally: John McCain for his age ("I don't need a president with a bucketful list"), Hillary Clinton for not knowing when to go home gracefully (comparison her to a desperate woman r the 15th Essence, scheduled for July thirty-five in the Dome. Beyonce's 2007 record ranked among the selfsame best in the festival's history.
What other surprises might be in store for 2009? Early fan suggestions include a reunited Commodores, a rehabbed Whitney Houston, Sade and/or Tina Turner. All would be welcome on Essence's sparkling new stage.
Music writer Keith Spera can be reached at kspera@timespicayune.com, or 504.826.3470.
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