Life is brutal but beautiful: R.A. the Rugged Man’s performance compulsion

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday at a livemusic venue called Fitzgerald’s sometime round midnight underground hip-hop artist R.A. the Rugged Man (R.A. Thorburn) took the stage before an audience of perhaps 300 people and scaled his performance for 20,000, which came expected to anyone in attendance: there was no chance Thorburn’d give less than everything to a show whatever its size. About two hours later and 30 minutes past lastcall and 15 minutes past closing Thorburn continued to perform, playing his fifth or sixth “one more song” of the night.

Like most anyone reading this column I discovered Thorburn through his roughtrade undressing of Floyd Mayweather in a 2009 interview. Curiosity about a guy who knew Floyd’s mind and spirit well as Floyd got me to listen to a few samples from a musical genre I loved until 1992 then abandoned completely. Thorburn’s talent arrived like a flash of light, unmistakable, and I pledged to see him in the crucible of a live performance if ever the opportunity arose.

It did Saturday and so did this observation: Never has a performer needed the stage more than Thorburn does. What happened at the end of his concert betrayed a compulsion more than a desire to entertain; his numerous appeals – “If y’all make some noise, I’ll do one more song” over and over again – were pleas much more than demands or even statements; it was a glare inside the psyche of a man doing the one thing that holds him together, manifesting a need for his audience’s energy and kindness, affirmation of a potent and unusually physical sort, in a charming-to-the-edge-of-disconcerting way.

It is no secret the sorry financial state of the music industry – and notice you never hear talk of a sculpture industry or a literary industry – but slightly more of an insight to see musicians’ necessary return to performance art, vending concert experiences in lieu of studio experiences, as the exclusive future direction for those who hope to make a living at the craft, but what three hours of undercard performances showed Saturday is contemporary hip-hop artists either don’t know this or lack the tools for it. What one sees in the coming generation of rappers is weakness, simple stagefright, hoping to disguise itself as a personal journey towards higher consciousness. From the hunched shoulders and swallowed syllables to a common retreat from the stagefront edge, complementing sundry cliches about day-one this and haters and enemies that, these aspirants resemble nothing so much as a oneway series of emails from a dating profile:

Message 1: Whatup bae this is Hier Konshuznezz the Unlimitid 1. im one of a kind so im kinda the one. Hit me up if you down. Holla!

Message 2: lol this thing on? im talkin at you gurl

Message 3: HELLO! Holla!

Message 4: u think ur 2 good for me bitch?

Message 5: can we jus start over? im sorry for using that word in my last. im not that kinda guy. i have so much pain in me. i understand if you dont want to talk to me. Sorry. Bye.

Then Thorburn takes the stage and the tenor changes. He and his apprentices are large and imposing in a way that’d be menacing were they not smiling at themselves and the audience, had they not the presence and ironical knack that once composed basic stagecraft but now’s a rarity: Their exaggerated gestures are enormous, they reclaim the stage’s front edge from the audience the way competent trainers teach their charges (King of the Mountain: You imagine the center of the canvas as the base of a mountain against which you set your backfoot, and which you do not forfeit), they make eyecontact with their audiencemembers and project to the backwall, they use their bodies as instruments. Then Thorburn in his desperation to connect pulls strangers onstage with him and bangs against them like props and urges them to be irresponsible, and when this doesn’t suffice Thorburn climbs offstage and moves through his audience colliding with them, telling them to collide with him, offering them something they will not forget instead of something “unforgettable”:

The audience is no longer 100 strong the houselights are on brightly the bar is clean and Thorburn starts to clear the stage by telling audiencemembers to dive in the waiting arms of, well, perhaps two or three others and some splatter and others get caught and still Thorburn does not relent, starting a fourth one-more song or fifth. Then he climbs offstage a final time and tells everyone to follow him to the door for pictures and handshakes, where he remains.

Last week by way of coincidence I read Geoff Dyer’s wonderful “But Beautiful: A book about jazz” that does what all Dyer’s books do which is defy classification between fiction and non- before concluding with an essay about what happened to jazz as popular music: It stopped being about improvisation and began being about technical mastery and thereby receded from our country’s predominant artform to a niche notch on the FM dial and a catalog of deceased household names. This is where underground hip-hop now heads. Its need to distinguish itself from what cloying slop fills arenas is understandable, admirable: Keepers of the Public Enemy flame, as it were, artists proudly inspired by Kane, G Rap, Erick and Parrish, and Rakim, not Kanye West and Nipsey Hussle, but this distinction brings about a display of technical mastery that is nigh unlistenable.

Like Coltrane throttling his sax the velociraptor speedspitting feats exemplified best by A-F-R-O, Thorburn’s 18-year-old prodigy protege, go from astounding to tedious in less than a song – you admire his linguistic capacity to know and use so many words that rhyme while being so unable to decipher what he’s saying you’re unsure if he’s rhyming words or making sounds but trust he’s rhyming words until you ask yourself why you should have to trust this about something that ostensibly happens in your native language.

Oh well. It’s still stagecraft. It’s still part of the Rugged Man experience. If it’s art for art’s sake that’s not a bad way to go out.

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Editor’s note: Next week this column will take a deserved sabbatical and return on Feb. 6.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry