Alex Turney/Staff

Despite the cooling October air and looming midterms, hundreds of Berkeley students in warm sweaters, beanies and tie-dye clothing crowded Sproul Plaza early Friday evening in eager anticipation of the arrival of the celebrated Zion I hip-hop crew. About 5 p.m., local trap artists DRIPMOB took to the stage, warming up the crowd with their edgy reworks of popular hip-hop tracks. The throbbing bass took hold of the audience, triggering cult dance moves such as “the stanky leg” within a large breakdance circle near the stage. While the focus during the opening act appeared to be on the exaggerated dancing, attention shifted to the stage when the sky grew dark and Zion I arrived.

The Zion I crew, consisting of Oakland natives MC Zumbi and producer AmpLive, has toured worldwide but always returns to its Bay Area roots. The artists’ performance was intimate but energizing, drawing the crowd closer with their powerful lyrics and spacey tracks such as “Float,” a collaboration with electronic music producer Minnesota. Zumbi kept the crowd engaged with his improvised lyrics, which he explained after the show were “how (Zion I) learned to do music … through freestyling.”

Zion I has been on the rise in the melding genres of hip-hop and electronic, releasing tracks with electronic gurus like SBTRKT and Bassnectar. Recently, Zion I toured with reggae rock group Rebelution and reggae artist Matisyahu, experiences that allowed for further development of Zion I’s evolving sound.

“I remember the guys from Rebelution came up to me,” Zumbi said of an experience partying in Tahoe. “They were ultra encouraging … it was so cool to hear other musicians encouraging me from an authentic place.”

Zion I’s performance on campus, presented by ASUC SUPERB, was a free event open to all. “I feel like … every time I leave and come back I love (the Bay Area) even more, because I realize how unique and special it is,” Zumbi said after the performance.

On Oakland’s influence on Zion I’s sound, Zumbi said, “(Oakland) is so diverse. I feed on all that energy … I pull from all the good and the bad.” As we talked, fans scuttled behind the stage to wait to take pictures with Zumbi, who humbly obliged. He seemed unfazed by the interruptions, pleased to meet and hear from students. His down-to-earth outlook is definitely reflected through Zion I’s lyrics, as Zumbi explained that he’s frustrated by the superficiality of most rap music.

“(There are) things in hip-hop that I feel are not being addressed that are important,” he said. “I want to fill in the gaps, (but) not be too cerebral that it’s too static.”

It quickly becomes clear that Zion I, which has been a part of the hip-hop and rap scene since the late 1990s, is both conscious of and concerned about the expansion of rap music. Zumbi noted, “These days, the culture is watered down … it’s not a sub-culture anymore.”

He advises aspiring artists in the genre to “get in tune with what you believe in.” The future of hip-hop looks brighter, though. Zumbi believes there has been a resurgence in recent years of younger artists trying to reclaim something of the older era. “I pray that it evolves beyond that (too),” he said.

On future collaborations, Zion I hopes to work with rapper Andre 3000, Yasiin Bey, the hip-hop recording artist formerly known as Mos Def, or the Swedish electronic group Little Dragon’s vocalist Yukimi Nagano.

The campus crowd was thrilled by Zion I’s performance and proximity — many students lingered after the show to chat and take pictures with the hip-hop duo. It seems Zion I’s success is due to its ability to be incredibly inventive yet accessible — something unprecedented in the realm of spoken music of the present.

Contact Kate Irwin at kirwin@dailycal.org.

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Carli Baker/Senior Staff

Beneath the red, green and blue-lighted pillars of Sproul Hall, London-based electronic artist Max Cooper played to a mostly student crowd of about 120 Thursday night. The free outdoor concert, put on by UC Berkeley’s ASUC SUPERB, featured a half-hour opening set by student group String Theory followed by an almost two-hour performance by Cooper.

A former genetics researcher at University College London with a doctorate in computational biology, the 33-year-old Belfast native has been writing and performing electronic music professionally since 2007. Starting out as a dance DJ in the late ’90s, Cooper came to realize his inclination toward composing and producing music while pursuing his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees in the mid-2000s. He has since released more than 50 original tracks and remixes.

Cooper has caught the ear of publications like Clash Magazine and IDJ Magazine, and his music has earned him accolades such as the title of one of Resident Advisor’s top live acts of 2012 and the fifth position on Beatport’s list of the top artists of 2012. Thursday’s performance came at the tail end of Cooper’s roughly weeklong North American tour, which included appearances in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Oakdale, Calif. (for Symbiosis Gathering), and Juarez.

The artist began his set Thursday night with a resounding crunch. Reacting to what Cooper considers his more academic material, the crowd nodded sporadically to broken, mechanized sounds coming at a crawling pace. With the introduction of more sounds, both rhythmic and melodic, there eventually emerged a recognizable song to which the crowd was able to move in sync — but always with abstract, soundscape-like underpinnings.

Through his music, Cooper tries to evoke feelings, images and different states of mind.

“I write music to communicate a concept or a feeling,” he said after the show. “I usually start with an image or an emotion, and I ask myself, ‘How can I translate this into music?’”

Throughout the show, Cooper created what he calls “musical environments,” characterized by minimalist instrumentation and effected sounds, heavy on the reverb. But these more thoughtful, evocative compositions were interwoven with undeniably danceable tracks, full of throbbing bass, hard-hitting drums, rhythmic sequencing and totally graspable melodies. For Cooper, it’s all about toeing the line between the academic and the danceable.

“I want people to have fun with my music, so it should be danceable,” he said. “But I also want to challenge people — I want it to be musically interesting.”

Though stressing the fact that his creative process is emotive and feel-driven, Cooper recognized some crossover between his previous career in genetics research and composing music.

“What I was doing before and what I do now both have a lot to do with taking something that’s more abstract and recognizing patterns within it,” he said. “Genetics is recognizing patterns in signs, and music is recognizing patterns in nature.”

As the night progressed, so did the amount of bounce in the music and movement in the crowd. Speaking to the musical evolution of the set, Cooper said that he never plans a setlist in advance.

“I don’t plan out the songs I play beforehand,” he said. “I get a feeling from the crowd and I stick with it. It’s all improvised.”

As shown through the multiple times he raised his hands in appreciation toward the audience, Cooper said that he had a great time playing on Sproul.

“The crowd was really open-minded tonight,” he said. “I felt free to do what I wanted to do.”

With a new album in the works, a busy touring schedule for the coming months and increasing critical and popular attention, Max Cooper’s continued success in the electronic music scene is as guaranteed as his groove.

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Taryn Erhardt/Senior Staff

Editor’s note: This feature is one of a two-part series analyzing new shifts in hip-hop as demonstrated by two rising artists (one established, the other underground) that deny conventions on the national stage and in our community: Danny Brown and Zachg.

On the 2002 track “Oops (Oh My)”, Tweet’s skirt accidentally drops to her feet and “Oops,” Fabolous raps, “There goes my kids all over your face.” Ten years later, “Tweet’ has its own disambiguation page on Wikipedia. It’s first and foremost a bird vocalization, then a “post made on the microblogging site Twitter” and thirdly, the name of an R&B artist. All three are relevant to rapper Danny Brown. Sometimes his raps are spit in bird-style squawks. He would “fuck a female MC and a pop artist / … dick so big stretch marks on her jaw.” There wouldn’t be a need to apologize to Brown for bad aim. Crispy, post-coital hair is his look.

Music journalists, fans and his label are fixated on this aesthetic; Danny Brown is fixated on their fixation. He thinks Wiz Khalifa is the least stylish rapper out there (“He just looks like everything is free,”) and raps that  “He made ‘Black and Yellow’, / I’mma make it black and emo.” On stage, he rattles around a cage of steely electro blips with animalistic rap. Brown’s got a hyena cackle of a laugh and off-pitch whining that starts to sound very duck-like.        His label Fool’s Gold writes that Brown “is able ignite buzz without calculatedly chasing it down.” They’re chasing the narrative of the unself-conscious artist, implicitly holding up a crucifix at notoriously manufactured artists like Lana Del Rey. One of those igniters of buzz is Pitchfork, which gave Brown’s album XXX an 8.2. He claims they regretted the score. “They said, if they could review it again, they would give it a lot higher review. So to me, I just feel like I’m cooler than them right now cause I made an album that they slipped on and then they had to apologize to me about it,” he said. He buys into Pitchfork as the barometer of “coolness” in indie rap. He’ll get bumped “a couple extra” decimal points next album.

In piquing the interest of an avant-garde-hungry indie audience, Danny Brown violates many of the codes of mainstream rap. In April, he tweeted: “wiggers hate me cause i dont dress like a nigga … black bloggers hate me cause im loved by white music journalists.” Brown hopes his refusal to sign with a major label will allow him to continue to thrive in this discord between the rap status quo and “progressive indie” expectations. “I might not sell a lot of records, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be a cult hero,” he said. “… I’d just rather be like that, then to be like, cool with lame people. That’s what I’ve been seeing a lot lately, like lame music fans.”

Before his ASUC Superb show on Lower Sproul April 20, he sat in the corner of a Berkeley classroom. A salami sandwich on white bread lay half eaten on a table in front of him, pulled from a food spread of Trader Joe’s-style junk food. Really, he was fiending for “Garden Wheat Thins. Those joints, I could kinda smash a box of those quick.”

Occasionally I could see him browsing Twitter on his iPhone. When I checked the site later, he’d re-tweeted about 15 people. He tweeted a picture of his tall t-shirt, thigh-hugging capri track pants and sneakers with fat blue tongues lagging out; all pulled from the Adidas Originals x Jeremy Scott collection. A follower commented underneath the post, “Jeremy Scott #fag.”

Brown’s politics — for example, his view that there should be stricter domestic violence laws —  also lie on the fringes of the mainstream rap industry. “That shit should seriously be like felonies. Like hitting females. Any type of abuse toward women, should be more so than murder!” In spite of this view, lyrically on the track “30” he “fucked a pregnant bitch, saved money on her abortion.” There’s not a single song on the album without creatively rendered sexual domination platitudes. The dissonance makes his claim that he couldn’t give a lecture like Lil B because, “I’m just drugs, video games, and sex, if you wanna talk about those,” — an essentialization of his identity.

The song “30” and his album title “XXX” specifically refer to Brown’s age. He has almost 10 years on the other nine rappers in XXL’s 2012 Freshman Class, blazing a trail for rappers like Zachg, a rising Bay Area artist who is pursuing a similar audience.Forty minutes later at Brown’s show, “Virgin Mary doing lines in the pick up / Make Sarah Palin deep-throat ‘til she hiccup” drew a mixed reaction from the crowd. His flow is rubbery and the beats muffled on “Pac Blood,” the cackles of the crowd becoming a quasi-laugh track. One couple exchanged a meaningful look and head out. Tall and lanky, Zachg stood backstage with a camera out, grinning.

“He’s been a big kind of inspiration for me. You know he’s someone who’s the same age as me — which is really viewed as ‘too old for rap’ who is making a name for himself solely on being himself,” Zachg said. “… I think in the sense of brands we are kind of similar. Both kind of nerdy, but aware of fashion and what’s hip, and accessible but still kinda unacceptable.”

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