Day after Christmas, dropped my brother off at BWI, then went to the Thunderdome, which is a rock club in north Baltimore where hair metal has-beens like Bret Michaels of Poison and local heroes Kix play all the time. But tonight, what's been hyped up as one of the biggest nights of the year for Baltimore hip hop, the 2nd year of Strength In Numbers. Billed as an MC battle but it really seems to be more of a showcase. People pay a registration fee ($20 for MCs, $25 for groups) to get up and get their 3 minutes onstage. And then, as the advertisement goes, performances by some of biggest MC's in Baltimore of the past few years, especially Bossman, who just dropped his first official non-mixtape album less than a week ago and it's sold out in half the stores in the city. Posters for the album everywhere around and inside the club.

The schedule goes something like: doors at 6, performances start at 7, then Bossman and the other headliners at 10:30, after party at 11:30. I get there around 8, the performances don't start until about an hour later. The host is a guy called Stevie Stay Hi, the Low Key God, Baltimore veteran, in the rap game 11 years, in jail for 4 of them, and in a wheel chair now. He just talks on the mic for the most of the first hour I'm there, about the even and about all kinds of random shit and mostly just warning people not to start shit and ruin it for everybody. This is the kind of event where every other performer finishes by dropping or throwing their mic on the stage for dramatic effect and then the promoter yelling at them not to drop the fucking mics they paid for.

At these kind of things, you don't really remember the decent or good acts, but you remember the bad ones and the embarrassing ones. There are a few white MCs throughout the night, and most of them are ok and take it seriously, but the first one called himself DMD, and he was this goofy dude who freestyled over the Terror Squad "Take Me Home" beat and it was just terrible and at first people laughed and booed but he just kept going and some of his lines where so ridiculous that eventually people started laughing with him and he kinda won the crowd over. At the end he said that DMD stands for Death Metal Don and that he's in a metal band. But the worst was this crew from Alexandria who must've paid extra for their time onstage, because they took up a huge block of time, like 7 or 8 songs. There were 3 guys and 2 girls, and they did a whole bunch of different kinds of things, fake crunk and R&B and spoken word, but it was all generic bullshit, and if they weren't from Virginia or didn't take up so much fucking time they woulda been ok but altogether it was just bullshit and everyone couldn't wait for them to get done.

C. Miller was there with his crew, which included Spit-1, who produced a bunch of songs for Comp and one on Bossman's album. He did his big radio hit "Mean Mug", but his crew's mics were all louder than his for some reason and it was kind of a mess. Prhyme and Great Mindz were there. Tyree Corleone went on torward the end and did a few songs, including his awesome song produced by Rod Lee that samples the tom tom triplets from Cee-Lo's "I'll Be Around". And Ray Lugar did his song from The Movement Vol. 2, which was pretty good. But aside from that, there weren't really any people there I'd heard of, and none of the billed performers: no Tim Trees, no B Rich, no Mullyman. I think I saw Bossman and NEK in the room earlier in the night, but they were all long gone by the time all the people who paid to perform were done, which was around 1am. Most of the place, which had been packed when I got there, had emptied out by then, and it would've been pretty anti-climactic if any big names came out and performed for such a small crowd anyway. But it was still lame how it didn't come together at all like it was supposed to.

Labels: Ray Lugar, Team Fifty, Tyree Colion