Cultured Vultures at Boom Bap Festival

Music festivals that adhere to one specific genre are always risky; you have to really love a kind of music to an almost suspect degree to be able to withstand a 3-day onslaught of it without ever pining for a little more variety. Hip-hop however is blessed by the fact that it’s both decidedly varied and beyond a mere kind of music, instead being a complete cultural paradigm (consisting of 4 disciplines: MCs, DJs, graffiti and break-dancing). The odds for Boom Bap were pretty good from the outset, then.

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Photo courtesy of Jez Simpson

Boom Bap has been going for 3 years now and it’s been growing ever since, this year expanding to its largest crowd capacity yet and a bigger location, Mildenhall Stadium in Suffolk (usually used for dog racing). Since it was my first year going I didn’t have much of a frame of reference, but it was clear from speaking to veterans and videos of previous years that they’d turned everything up to 11. The line-up was kind of a clue too, beyond being a purely home-grown roster, artists from areas as far afield as Australia and Iceland were involved as well as some notable US artists headed by the legendary Wu-Tang alum, Ghostface Killah.

I’d bought my ticket well in advance and had been hotly anticipating it. I love small festivals, they have an insular quality that events on a larger scale lack and there’s something comforting about being able to see your tent from almost every area of the grounds, I once spent almost an hour despairingly wandering around the Bestival site with a slowly dying phone torch trying to find my dwelling so I could die in peace. More to the point though, I adore the UK hip-hop scene, it might not have the global impact that the US scene has (yet) and it might be mocked by certain unenlightened facets of the media industry (Vice, I’m looking at you) but that’s all down to a lack of exposure, it’s a wildfire of raw talent fed by a fantastic selection of hard working record labels and a deeply dedicated fan community. Boom Bap is the biggest singular celebration of it that you’ll find anywhere.

The signs before I arrived weren’t exactly enticing, despite the Met Office making promises of a dry weekend, the preceding night bore witness to a vile, foreboding rainstorm which had me hurriedly retrofitting my camping gear for wet weather and swearing at things. Thankfully the air had dried out by the time we rolled onto the site on Friday afternoon, doubly thankful in fact because it took almost three hours of queuing to get in, the ticket checking gate was seemingly outfitted with a country fete in mind, rather than a festival of thousands. Once we actually got inside though it seemed like a niggling criticism, the set-up was first-rate, a good sized main stage, the Square One indoor stage largely intended for DJ sets, rap battles and the wondrous beat battles, which I’ll get back to later, a stage for dub and reggae curated by the Lionpulse soundsystem crew and the ‘Clockwork Stage’, which divided its time between other hip-hop acts, jungle and drum and bass. Beyond all that there was also a nicely mixed aisle of food stalls, large sections of wall left blank for the graffiti artists, a couple of chilling areas, bars and one particularly brilliant seating area that housed two arcade machines and a big soundsystem which you could plug your phone/iPod into and play your own tunes. Unsurprisingly there was often stiff competition to implement it.

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Photo courtesy of Jez Simpson

The Friday had a pretty chilled onset, probably due to the staggered arrival of guests throughout the day; the first early event of note was the first round of the rap battles, which was a fun way to kick things off. Later in the evening the main stage absolutely lit up, the main highlights being a storming set from Verb T & Kashmere, shortly followed by an equally massive one by The Four Owls, one of my favorite hip-hop groups. Chester P rounded the night off, living up to his lofty reputation. I spent most of the rest of the night talking to people and really getting a feel for the festival. I did this until it was almost 5am because I am thorough. I even managed to get a turn to hook my phone up for at the Plug and Play tent, at that point there was so much competition for airtime that there was an unspoken ‘one song per customer’ rule in place, I went with J Dilla’s E=MC2, it faired well.

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Photo courtesy of Jez Simpson

Like I said earlier the variety of content was a real benefit to the festival, you were never short of things to do regardless of how close to death’s door you might have felt. I was close enough to peek through the letterbox on Saturday morning/early afternoon so the chance to watch the graffiti artists do their thing for an hour or sit in Square One in the shade and listen to the beat battles was just what the doctor ordered.

The battles were particularly excellent; a real heady mixture of tight, inventive beats which provided a nice little break from all the spittle. An early evening performance from the soulful, honey-voiced Rag N Bone Man on the Clockwork Stage also helped with the contrast.

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Photo courtesy of Jez Simpson

Later on the rain finally arrived but thankfully it only hung around for a few hours and did nothing to deter the crowd from the enormity of the evening lineup on the main stage. Trellion and Sniff, luminaries of the Bad Taste label more than made up for their late arrival, Triple Darkness were fantastic and Cas came blasting onto the stage with a shiny new persona involving a skull mask and a gimp in tow (for reasons known only to himself). The real hammer blow came after that though, it took an excruciating build up before he finally appeared, but Ghostface Killah proved to be absolutely worthy of the place in the hip-hop hall of fame he’s earned. He played a well-paced, varied set of newer and older material and then, as he prepared to play Protect Ya Neck (had to happen), something miraculous occurred.

Ghost appealed to the crowd to see if anyone knew Method Man and Old Dirty Bastard’s verses so that he could do the track properly and amazingly someone actually stepped up. It was none other than BVA, a much-loved MC on the High Focus label and member of Brothers of the Stone. It was the stuff dreams were made of, he nailed every line, was warmly received by Ghost and glided off the stage like a child who had just met Santa, the crowd were going absolutely ballistic and it was hard to blame them.

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Photo courtesy of Jez Simpson

The rest of the Saturday night was spent once again just taking in the rest of the site, since the main stage closed down after Ghost wrapped up. The grounds were alive with energy, the other 3 stages kept pumping until the early hours, beat boxing sessions and cyphers were popping up wherever you looked and things stayed energized until well past sunrise. Sunday had a much earlier wrap-up time of around 6pm, so the main stage had a breathless, 6 hour marathon of big acts planned out, making it the ideal place to dig in for the day, especially if you hadn’t slept and were still trying to figure up from down by then. Things kicked off promptly with Australia’s Toddla MC at around noon and it only got better from there, despite some early audio issues. The set times varied from half an hour to a full 60, which kept the pace nice and fluid.

Split Prophets and Buggsy made sure the Bristol scene was well represented, Brothers of the Stone and Dirty Dike did High Focus proud and The Mouse Outfit absolutely killed it, bring a refreshing blast of live instrumentation to the proceedings. Appropriately the celebrated conqueror that is Blak Twang finished everything off and that was all she wrote. I can imagine that the Sunday night was just as manic as the previous two but unfortunately I had to head home (well, Burger King first, priorities man). Once back in the real world I managed to make it until the 80th minute of the World Cup final before passing out and sleeping for 13 hours solid.

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Photo courtesy of Jez Simpson

I’ve got a feeling that Boom Bap is only going to get bigger as time goes by. The UK hip-hop scene is getting noticed more and more every year, there’s always been some real talent there but the platform is rising faster now than it ever has before.

Boom Bap celebrates it, advertises it and defines it, you could feel the passion and reverence flowing through the festival, everybody was in on it (except one of the guys running the shop kiosk, poor guy allegedly really hated hip-hop and I don’t think the weekend converted him).

Keep your eyes on this one, the future’s bright.

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