Image by Beverly Bryan
Scream Club tells Atlanta crunk’s not dead
April 1, 2008, at Eyedrum
By Beverly Bryan
Published: April 2nd, 2008 | 10:30pm
Scream Club brought its synchronized dance moves to cavernous Atlanta art space Eyedrum for a night of gay southern hip-hop with Anaturale, Badkat, and Athens Boys Choir, organized by Georgia’s Feminist Outlaws.
Even with their hard beats and heart-stopping rhymes about life, love, and dancing, it might be hard to handle Cindy Wonderful and Sarah Adorable if they took themselves too seriously. But both being funky and punk as fuck, it's clear that they don't, because Scream Club live also is funny. You knew there was no room for self-importance in their game when Cindy Wonderful asked the crowd, “How many rappers do you know with onesies?” Room for self-aggrandizement is another story, but when you are wonderful and your partner in rhyme is adorable, it’s really best not to sugarcoat things.
The former couple did show off their sweet side with “And You Belong,” a honey-dripping-but-fly love song written once upon a time by Wonderful for Adorable. The plot twisted, as Adorable had already revealed in the Bronski Beat–sampling “Life of a Heartbreaker” that she is a bit of a player. Playing to the crowd, Adorable said she was impressed with Atlanta — in part, because everyone was pretty hot.
Scream Club not only wore onesies, but matching, hooded, faux leopard-print onesies. As the night progressed, they stripped off layers to reveal a succession of striking costumes that put them in the running for the best-dressed butch/femme rap duo to rock Atlanta since Outkast.
The headgear on stage — which started with bear-head hats — created a tense audience/performer ecosystem on the breezy April Fool’s evening. Many at Eyedrum wore the bunny ears that identified them as “tricksters.” Tricksters they might have been, but there were predators on stage. Adorable and Wonderful rapped about squeezing boobies and their favorite San Francisco girl gang that really takes back the night — by giving out “free, homemade circumcisions.”
Some might consider it irresponsible to rap about making the streets safe for all gender identities at the end of a switchblade. But perhaps, in a country where violence against those who are gay or transgendered remains a regular occurrence, as Athens Boys Choir pointed out, such dangerous humor might be very necessary.
All three Athens-based queer-hoppers who opened for Scream Club brought a sense of urgency and humor to lyrics about sexual identity. Signed to Scream Club’s Crunks Not Dead label, Anaturale brought clever word play to bear on gender theory before concluding that, frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.
Badkat has been rapping since the early ’90s and it showed in flow. Rapid-firing over Primus and Tori Amos samples, she seemed a bit like your queer studies professor with her wire-frame glasses and similes involving the FCC, except that your queer studies professor probably does not possess her freestyling skills.
Athens Boys Choir turned out to be just one dude armed only with risqué video montages and embarrassing footage of his conservative bat mitzvah in Miami. Over video of said bat mitzvah, he declared himself the “Easy Heeb” in a rap song, following it up with Sir Mix-A-Lot send-up “Tranny Got Pack.” By the time he got to his spoken-word piece, he began with the words “Our love is like a Kaboodle,” the crowd was in stitches. If Athens Boys Choir isn’t the funniest gay Jewish man in therapy in rap, he is certainly the funniest one to have been bat mitzvahed.
Issue #25
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