Went to the Freddie Gibbs concert in Boston Saturday night, we rolled pretty deep and had a lot of fun. Unfortunately we pregamed a little too long (as tends to happen) and missed the openers (Remy Banks and LE$, I had heard rem. by Remy but otherwise didn’t know them). Fortunately, we arrived right at 10:30pm when Freddie Gibbs went on. The venue was the Middle East in Cambridge, we were specifically in the underground section which is just about the perfect size for a show.
I first started following Freddie Gibbs after hearing How We Do upon downloading The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs. Gangsta Gibbs has a huge body of work, ranging from mixtapes over trap beats to an album produced entirely by Madlib, a hip hop DJ and production legend who embodies the term “crate digger”. Gibbs got a lot of mainstream scrutiny following the release of Old English in 2014 and has had consistently solid critical acclaim on many of his releases since (and there have been quite a few). His most recent album, You Only Live 2wice, was released on 3/31/2017 and continues the streak with mild success. Amnesia is a banger and there are a number of more classic hip hop beats that Gibbs flows on, not dissimilar from the sound on Pinata. There are a few great one liners as well, one that particularly stands out is “I be kicking shit like Solange in the elevator“.
Back to the show, I expected a lot of the newer tracks such as those off of You Only Live 2wice to be the focus of the performance. I was pleasantly surprised when the setlist was evenly distributed with his most popular songs throughout the last 5 or so years. He came out to Still Living which set an aggressive mood to the rest of the show. There were some slower songs for people to light up to, however throughout much of the show there were small mosh pits and water bottles being sprayed. About halfway through the set Freddie stopped the show and had a moment of silence to say RIP to Big Time Watts, who passed away a few months ago. Watts was Freddie Gibbs’ Uncle, is featured in skits on some of Gibbs’ work and was often posted on Gibbs’ vine, usually very drunk. Following this brief intermission Freddie took off his shirt and began going in on some verses acapella. He finished up with a few more bangers such as Amneisa and then played BFK as the closing song (it was lit). People started to leave and head over to the merch table when Gibbs came back on with a bottle of champagne and played Minnesota, spraying the champagne everywhere throughout the song. Gibbs and the crew hung around on the stage vibing with the crowd and signing records and merchandise for about 15 minutes. The DJ continued to play some current hot songs like 4am and eventually we left and went to a bar. All in all great concert, I had a couple cool pictures but my iphone was messing up importing onto windows 10 and now all I have is this grainy close up.
Stop Tweaking 