FUTURE
The Nest, Dalston | 26 February
At around the two minute mark in the video for Crack Magazine’s 50th best track of 2013, Atlanta rapper Future can be seen perched on the front of a Bugatti shaking his fists around and wobbling his head as his tyrannosaurus hook crashes in. For a lot of these shots, he is on his own.
This moment of private “turning up” without his safety blanket of associates (DJ Khaled, Ricky Rozay and Ace Hood) is perhaps a microcosm of Future’s never ending quest to get heads turnt. This voyage could be mistaken as a joint effort, shared amongst the hordes of over-confident whippersnappers that plague commercial hip-hop radio. However this hour-long show on a dark evening on Stoke Newington High Street showed an artist ever so slightly removed from the conventional sound palette of HOT 97. A man who was so integral in the machine being built, he now exists slightly to the left of it.
First of all, shouts out to Future for playing for an hour. Often these small-venue showcases for US rappers are little more than 35-minute clusterfucks with more people on stage than the Blazin’ Squad and DJs with an unfixable air horn addiction. For the 60 minutes Future was onstage, we were blessed with hearing his signature brand of extraterrestrial party-rap on tunes like Turn On The Lights, Same Damn Time and the bizarre auto-tuned whimper of Honest. The sound of Future’s voice is the sort you could imagine staining the wall. On Karate Chop, his liquor-fuelled bullets of computerised syllables are the sound of slanging narcotics, rolling in Ferraris (‘rraris) and having a fucking nice watch. A live-fast-die-young attitude brought to life in the form of a slippery onslaught of robotic mumblings.
Future’s DJ cuts the backing track at one point to reiterate that most central of instructions, “Everyone! Turn up!” The weird thing about this command was it’s noticeable lack of playfulness. Maybe playtime is over. Maybe we’ve gone on too long putting Bugatti or Sh!t on at the start of a night for a bit of a laugh thinking Future #FreeBandz would never notice. Maybe 2014 is the year that it gets real.
Clad in a PYREX hoodie and a Boy London beanie covering his newly dip-dyed dreadlocks, Future left the stage and left 349 normal people and one Tim Westwood battered and bruised by the assault of hook-heavy radio-rap that had just been unleashed upon them.
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Words: Duncan Harrison
Photo: Ciesay
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