Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Rock the Bells Nas was one of the hip-hop stars at this year's festival, on Governors Island.
By BEN RATLIFF
Last year Rock the Bells, the touring hip-hop bonanza, picked up on the voguish festival concept in which an artist performs an old record from beginning to end. It went well, and this year’s edition bought in twice as hard. On Saturday on Governors Island, amid other, more ordinary sets, 11 albums were performed in their entirety.
Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Lauryn Hill revisited her album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.”
Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Erykah Badu performing her “Baduizm” album Saturday on Governors Island at the annual Rock the Bells festival.
All but one of the albums re-enacted on Saturday came from 1993 to 1998, the era of the Wu-Tang Clan, neo-soul, and pre-post-gangsta, from platinum sellers down into rap nerdery: Nas’s “Illmatic”; Lauryn Hill’s “Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”; Erykah Badu’s “Baduizm”; Black Moon’s “Enta Da Stage”; Mobb Deep’s “Infamous”; GZA’s “Liquid Swords”; Cypress Hill’s “Black Sunday”; Killa Priest’s “Heavy Mental”; Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s “Black Star”; Raekwon’s “Only Built for Cuban Linx.” (The outlier was the “No Said Date,” by the Wu-Tang rapper Masta Killa, from 2004, a treat for hip-hop connoisseurs, recently revisited on the hip-hop blogs for its use of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” years before Jay-Z and Kanye West did the same on “Otis.”) Other, nonalbum sets came from those with a history or interest in underground rap: Freddie Gibbs, Blu, Immortal Technique.
Ms. Badu aced the assignment with extra credit. She never made the trip through an old achievement feel like a slog. Her set was a prolonged and relaxed tease, full of rehearsed goodbyes and jams that drifted into beautifully controlled funk experiments. The songs from “Baduizm” were fairly liquid in their original state, and she made them more so. “Other Side of the Game,” at the album’s midpoint, became a cloud of stop-time funk and soul moans. Later, deep into her game, she rapped Ice Cube’s first verse from N.W.A.’s “Gangsta Gangsta,” reminding you of two things about that song: that it was funny, and that it was seductive.
Lauryn Hill, performing her album for what was reported to be the first time, radiated almost the opposite disposition. She gave the album a new tension, with increased tempos and an urgent rasp. As she sang and rapped, she kept motioning vaguely and abruptly to the musicians behind her to drop out for half a bar or play harder or softer. Only once in a while they caught her suggestion and complied; for most of the set the music operated like a bludgeon. At the end she was joined by Pras, her old band mate in the Fugees, who performed with her briefly on “Ready or Not,” and by five of her six children, who stood in an orderly row to her right.
Black Moon, led by the rapper Buckshot, played much of its set with a backing band, including saxophonists mimicking smeared samples. It was a move that cut both ways. A competent group of live studio musicians, as these were, can make hip-hop sound anonymous, as these did. But the set felt distinct during a day in which hours of shouted rapping and similar-sounding backing tracks — midtempo bests with a distressed finish — could make you feel distracted.
Maybe the performers and engineers felt the same way. In the sets by the Wu-Tang affiliates — with an entire stage, one of the festival’s four, designated “36 Chambers” after the title of the group’s first record — you got what you came for: those grimy mid-90s beats, as well as fractured tag-team rapping, with sampled gunshots signaling the abrupt ends of songs. During the performance of Raekwon’s “Only Built for Cuban Linx,” Ghostface Killah — a featured rapper on most of its tracks — had had enough. He took a timeout and ordered a thorough midset sound check: “Gimme 800 Hertz, some more mids and some highs. Hey, hurry up. We ain’t got much time. Come on, pull us out more. One, two. One, two.” The engineers adjusted. “It’s coming.” He waited. “It’s coming.”
Breaking a silence Raekwon said: “Yo, Ghost. You want a sandwich, man?”
Nas, who closed the night on the main stage, got through his 17-year-old album patiently and pedantically. The set veered back and forth from the album’s track sequence, with guests, a constant back and forth between him and DJ Premier, the producer for some of the album’s songs and the M.C. for his stage show. The beats, spacious and plumped out in the best sound of the night, were fabulous.
He brought out Pete Rock, another one of his producers, and MC Serch, who had originally hooked him up for a record deal with Columbia; he acknowledged Faith Newman, his original A&R representative at the label. And he performed “Live at the Barbecue,” the 1991 song that marked his first appearance on record, as a teenager, with Main Source. (Other rappers on that track, Joe Fatal and Akinyele, came out too, as well as Large Professor, the Queens-born member of Main Source.) As Nas rapped his bragging introductory verse — “Stampede the stage, I leave the microphone split” — it was a time warp back to a naïve moment, or maybe just a focused one, when his main point wasn’t autobiography, allegories or social criticism but his own skill.
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