Should rappers retire, or grow old as (dis)gracefully as their rock’n’roll predecessors? The latter, to judge by the mayhem that a cast of American hip-hop veterans brought to Glasgow.
The aptly titled High Rollers tour counted casualties from the off. Support act the Game was a no-show, replaced by Eminem’s old mates D12, who kicked off the chaos by lighting up on stage. People starting lighting up in the audience and there was a distinct smell of weed. By the time a boisterous Cypress Hill came on stage to a kilt-clad bagpiper playing Flower of Scotland there were people collapsing in the crowd.
An audience of all ages adored the Californian group, whose heyday was three decades ago. The Cypress Hill frontman B-Real, wearing terrifyingly tight patchwork trousers, had a huge handrolled cigarette in one hand and a microphone bedecked with a massive marijuana leaf in the other. As he puffed and rapped in a voice not dissimilar to Donald Duck’s, matching clouds of smoke came from the crowd.
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The music was a riot of old-school beats, DJ scratching, thunderous percussion and weed-theme lyrics, which reached their peak with Roll It Up, Light It Up, Smoke It Up. Insane in the Brain, the band’s sole platinum UK hit, closed the set on — ahem — a high.
The headliner Ice Cube, formerly the fearsome frontman of the pioneering, politicised West Coast rap collective NWA, is 54, but has lost none of his nerve and little of his youthful fury. That said, he isn’t averse to indulging in the pantomime of his lesser peers. “Glass-go, keep it gangsta,” he instructed fans incessantly between firing out fierce, fleet-footed raps over sparse beats, badmouthing the American government, engaging the crowd in call-and-response choruses and playing pranks with his sidekick, the unfortunately named WC.
Natural Born Killaz was an early standout, and a pumped-up take on NWA’s classic Straight Outta Compton brought the house down. “Can Ice Cube still get on the mike and do what you like?” the stocky, bearded, black-clad rapper asked before a majestic Check Yo Self, his early 1990s hit that remains a masterclass. For the fans still standing the answer was obvious.
