Last weekend, we packed up two Subarus and headed north to Bangor, Maine. What the hell goes on in Bangor, Maine, you might ask? The KahBang film, art and music festival, thats what. Never heard of it? You will. The inaugural festival, held last year on the Bangor Waterfront, headlined Matt & Kim and a whole slew of smaller, relatively unknown north east and local acts. The whole thing could have flopped, but Justin Bradbury, head coordinator, went for it a second time, full force. With Vitamin Water as a main sponsor, KahBang 2010 saw OkGo, the one and only Biz Markie, and rapidly up and coming rapper B.o.B. as headliners, with supporting acts such as The Gay Blades and Bad Rabbits. We set up our tent, banner, and epic living room-esque display and basically chilled on a lawn in armchairs front and center before some pretty incredible performances. Gotta love Maine.
THE ACTS
The Gay Blades, from New York, rocked. Hard. In every way possible, which included one of the best freestyles I’ve ever heard.
Biz Markie, from another planet, is the most entertaining, quirkiest, weirdest, goofiest, dopest rapper I’ve ever seen. If you’re not familiar with his idiosyncratic style, its like Gift of Gab meets Lyrics Born meets Deltron meets Weird Al (with a touch of Rahzel). Some decent beatboxing accompanied freestyles and verses about things like picking one’s nose and of course a giant You Got What I Need singalong. We were laughing to ourselves the rest of the night.
The next night started off with a whole slew of small-medium and moving onto larger acts, most notably Bad Rabbits (Boston), OkGO and ATL’s B.o.B. Bad Rabbits were awesome. Super-energized frontman rapper rocked the stage with high-pitched hooks and seamless verses, while the band cranked out some serious funk. They danced, they jammed, and they even nailed an I Want You Back cover which obviously had everyone smiling.
OkGO, in my opinion, put on the best performance of the night. These guys have it on LOCK. It was the OkGO variety show: crowd participation in which one lucky dude got to play Damian Kulash’s guitar during Here It Goes Again, some energizing call and response, some Kulash playing in the middle of the crowd, a seamless and beautifully executed hand bell rendition, LOTS of confetti, and finally an amazing performance of This Too Shall Pass with crowd chorus singalong. Amazing.
B.o.B.’s performance was not the gunshot SFX ridden southern money tossin’ bousss show I expected, but rather a tight, perhaps over-synced repertoire involving backup singers, dancers, and a live band. B.o.B. himself is a regular looking young dude rocking red Supra’s, wayfarers, a red flannel and skinny jeans, or in other words, a clean cut hipster who’s killing the pop-R&B scene right now. Not on Drake’s level, but certainly not the same genre either. Regardless, the kid’s got swagger, talent, and pretty soon the great state of Maine will be bragging that “we got B.o.B. before he was big”.
Unfortunately I couldn’t snag any good pics of Bobby Ray doing his thing, but here are more shots from the weekend:
It wasn’t an eco-village. It was an awesome village with a borrowed eco-village tent.
Photos courtesy of Matt Homer.
Dear JAQK….I really want that ram painting