Meet me in the club.

I went to the club or realistically a club, but everyone down here says the club in reference to going out at night. I was supposed to meet up with a few co-workers, which fell through and I ended up heading down to ‘the club’ with a few friends. I had heard that there was going to be a live performance by Yo Gotti, an underground hip-hop artist recently gone mainstream out of Memphis. He raps about hustling, hoes, money, shootings blah, blah, blah.

The atmosphere was tense. It was not an environment of peace and love particularly when the DJ is firing off shot-gun explosion sound clips at every chance he gets. The majority of music was violence related, people were intoxicated, and bouncers were tossing thugs out of the way. Through the three hours I was in attendance the DJ kept hollering, “And you know we got Yo Gotti in the house gonna perform a set for y’all.” After hearing that about four hundred million times along with endless shot-gun sound blasts, Yo Gotti finally did perform at about 1:30 am, thirty minutes before closing. Leading up to his act his whole crew came to the stage to spit lyrics and rap. The progression was clearly leading up to a main act. The first person to perform was garbage and the others became increasingly more polished along with bigger bling and better grills. Yo Gotti, leader of the camp was the obvious head-man with biggest and brightest chains and flashiest grill. I am not going to lie, his image was impressive with lights beaming of all his ice and flashing a diamond studded smile. However, the club turned the lights on when he came up to start his set. I was aggravated. Yelling at my friend, “Why are the lights on? This would be endlessly better if they were off. This is killing his performance.” Then a bouncer disposed of an individual who was getting to rowdy. Oh, the lights are on so no one gets shot or stabbed in the dark during the performance. Gee, why didn’t I put that together?

The evening was awesome. I was the only white face jumping around in the middle of the pit. The energy was intense. And then hearing shout-outs to the surrounding communities…Shelby in the house. Really, Shelby, town of 2000, it was way different than hearing ‘What Up! NYC’. Overall: a rock solid experience.