Kweli

Abruptly, the rapper Talib Kweli turned around and told his DJ to stop the music, then he asked the stage technicians to turn off the lights. So they dimmed them. “No no no,” he said. “All the way off. Turn the lights all the way off.”

It was a fire hazard for sure. Not only was the complete throbbing darkness of the concert hall claustrophobic, it was disorienting, like floating aimlessly in a starless outer space without a safety cord. We waited for his next move but he kept holding out on us, trying to build “anticipation” for this “dramatic moment.” The silence was uncomfortable at first, then exasperating, then deafening. The total visual and audio blackout seemed to enhance our sense of smell, and equally our tolerance of the strong oily body odor that saturated the audience. We waited.

And then he began rapping. You still couldn’t see a thing, but that was exactly the point. You heard his voice and that sample of “Eleanor Rigby” from the Beatles that he was using. It was “pure genius.” Everybody felt like they understood what was inside his soul, like they were a part of something bigger than themselves or hip hop itself.

Then a girl near us screamed rape, halting the show and putting the lights back on in a hurry, but it was a false alarm, and we all laughed, and then someone on the other side screamed rape as well, and another, and another. And it wasn’t plain old shrieking or what you’d expect in a Lifetime movie. People were literally screaming the word, rape. “RAPE!!!”

Talib asked us to show respect and to stop touching each other, and when everyone snickered, he ended his concert right then and there and walked off stage. He vowed never to step foot on that campus again. Everyone booed loudly, told him to go back to Brooklyn. He had just lost all street cred.