When big acts come to town, the tickets usually disappear from the interwebs so quickly your thoughts can turn conspiracy theorist like: maybe that Yeezus tour is never coming to Australia and Kanye just needed ticket money upfront to put North in Givenchy diapers because Huggies aren’t good enough for the spawn of a ‘creative Braveheart’. Maybe Splendour wasn’t hacked at all and they were just seeing who would notice the extra $K missing from their accounts. Music malnourishment is so mentally devastating to some fans that they start looking for tickets in chocolate bars.
On the flipside was Guilty Simpson’s Friday night Laundry show. Remembering the show after a double shift on a hangover I rang Laundry at 10pm to see if tickets were still on the door. “Yeah mate you won’t have any trouble at all,” was the response that got me thinking it wasn’t even the real Guilty and the gig was something like when you see a poster screaming DE LA SOUL and find out it’s just Maseo playing. My conspiring thoughts were quelled two hours later when the crowd caught Simpson red-handed with the mic on stage.
Guilty Simpson is in the echelons of the most venerated Detroit veterans: he’s rapped with Jay Dilla, MF Doom, Madlib, and virtually everyone else The Source magazine has on their office playlist. His set however was heavy on his collaborative mixtapes with Apollo brown and The Small Professor. Opening with Reputation he made his way through most of Dice Game punctuating tracks like One Man and Lose You with I’m the City and It’s Nuthin. That’s not to say he skipped on his classics, A Man’s World by Jay Dilla and Clap Your Hands by Peanut Butter Wolf got spin time amongst songs from Ode to the Ghetto.
Less bully than I thought he would be, Guilty Simpson didn’t quite appear to be rebranding himself as a softer ‘Guilty Simpson’, but spoke to the audience like he had a treasured aunt somewhere in the crowd. Showing finesse on the mic, Guilty’s vocals were on point with most songs sounding precisely like they do on his albums, showing this hungover pessimist that sometimes the perfect gig isn’t too good to be true.
BY EDGAR IVAN
Loved: Guilty Simpson.
Hated: Everyone from Broadmeadows who didn’t know the headlining act.
Drank: Bong water.
