What do you call two white rappers from Pittsburgh who tour with indie acts like Sage Francis and are rumored to douse their audiences with iced tea? Call them crazy, call them ADD poster-children, call them musical geniuses, but most of all, call them Grand Buffet. The rap duo, consisting of Lord Grunge and Jackson, recently embarked on a whirlwind two-stop tour and decided to grace Baltimore with their fabulous presence on the last day of their two-day tour.
The buzz surrounding Grand Buffet is that they were crazy in that inexplicable, from-another-realm-of-thinking, abundant energy, awe-inspiring kind of way. But when Lord Grunge asked to do the interview as they walked to the nearest convenience store (nearly four blocks south of the Ottobar) at 9:30 p.m., it became evident that they were crazy in every sense of the word. No one in their right mind walks the rainy streets of south Baltimore at night, even if it is Easter Sunday. It was true testament to their self-confidence that they refused to be intimidated, and self-confidence is a useful quality to have when your business is pioneering underground hip-hop.
Physically speaking, this duo is hip-hop's odd couple. Jackson is a wiry source of perpetual energy who speaks as eloquently and effortlessly as he raps. Lord Grunge towers fearlessly over the group and speaks passionately about his craft while constantly maintaining an acute sense of humor. Together they are a stand-up comedy tag team who can cuss fluently and yet remain positively charming at the same time. Best of all, they haven't developed the pretentious attitude of indie rock stars, despite the size of their cult following. While every other band is sitting for interviews underneath clouds of smoke inside the bar, these two are enthusiastically answering every question while standing, outside, in Baltimore, in the rain.
When you are faced with two people who seem to defy all conventional description, how then do you go about defining the music they create? They look like indie rockers but they rap; they rap like they're black, but they're white; they sound nothing like mainstream rap. They list everyone from Kate Bush, to Bowie, to the Talking Heads, to The Ghetto Boys as their influences but never once mention other white rappers like the Beastie Boys or Eminem. "We fall under hip-hop," Lord Grunge says, half-jokingly, "weirdo hip-hop, creepy guy hip-hop."
Of course, then, there is the subject of what kind of hip-hop. Is it emo rap or instrumental hip-hop? "We get sad and we get down on life," explains Jackson in reference to the emo style, "but we try to kick life in the ass as opposed to becoming self destructive and like crying about it. We try to emote like Batman and Spider-man would if they had microphones and instruments." Either way, the superheroes of underground rap are just trying to make the music that means something to them. "You could put us in hip-hop or electronic, you could put us in a couple different pockets," Jackson says, "but we're Grand Buffet more or less and we are trying to get really good at being Grand Buffet." The two then go on to describe their short-lived, two stop tour as "A suicide note. But its not a bad suicide note, it's a good suicide. It's like jumping into the sun." However, the two leave their reasons for such a short tour ambiguous and open-ended.
The only equipment Grand Buffet used onstage were two mics and a CD player. However, even with minimal equipment and only two voices, Grand Buffet produced the loudest show I have yet to hear at the Ottobar. Drinks at the bar were falling over but no one noticed because Grand Buffet knows how to rap, they know how to dance, and they know damn well how to keep an audience captivated. Jackson is a serial stage flailer, contorting and jumping in ways that cannot be healthy for a person. At one point he lay on his back and rose from the floor like a zombie. Lord Grunge knows how to dance and he does it well, even peppering his performance with a few fist-pumping moves of the "rock star persuasion."
Over self-produced beats, Lord Grunge and Jackson rapped about social injustice, monsters in the backyards, drugs, alcohol and pet abuse. In the pauses between songs, Jackson's frantically paced voice would bleed from a song into a stand-up comedy act that kept the audience involved. Their music is served fast with a side of heavy bass, but it's music that is guaranteed to make your body move. Jackson supplies more of the blindingly quick rhymes while Lord Grunge (when not rapping) lends his voice to singing the choruses. Though they ended the show with a hilarious display of their ad-lib freestyle, the defining moment of the show was when they introduced a song that was more pop-punk than hip-hop and psyched the crowd with their versatility.
