Ludacris as Curator of His Own Hip-Hop Museum

Ludacris, in concert on Tuesday at the Highline Ballroom, welcomed guests representing hip-hop heritage.
By JON CARAMANICA
NYTimes
Published: November 26, 2008


In a video on the YouTube channel of Ludacris’s label, Disturbing tha Peace, he watches as DJ Premier, the primary architect of 1990s East Coast rap formalism, picks out a line from an old Ludacris song, “Stand Up,” and cues up his turntable. Casually the D.J. begins cutting the vocals immaculately into smaller and smaller bits while Ludacris reclines in a chair, pleased with the view.

So distant is the moment when artful D.J.ing was an essential part of hip-hop culture that watching DJ Premier is a little like regarding an exhibit at a folk-art museum — a hip-hop Colonial Williamsburg.

Consider Ludacris an enthusiastic re-enactor, then, and also the rare Southern rapper who considers working with DJ Premier — or time traveling, as it were — a feather in his cap. Accordingly, the smile on his face Tuesday night as he brought Premier onstage at the Highline Ballroom was wide and irrepressibly sincere. Premier produced “MVP,” a no-frills track from Ludacris’s sixth album, “Theater of the Mind” (D.T.P./Def Jam), for which this show was a release party.

Despite accidents of birth (Illinois) and geographic relocation, Ludacris is firmly a New York nostalgist trapped in the body of an Atlanta motormouth. An almost impossibly precise rapper who often mistakes enthusiasm for charm, he would have been exceedingly comfortable in New York’s underground scene of the mid- to late 1990s, where battle-rap champions were the stars and tricky polysyllabic rhyme schemes mattered more than Q scores.

Not that Ludacris is immune to the pulls of celebrity. His film career has grown with roles in “Crash,” “RocknRolla” and “Max Payne.” He cut off his signature dreadlocks in favor of a more clean-cut look. He often goes by his real name, Chris Bridges. And his new album also carries an air of pretentiousness: guests aren’t featured, they’re “co-starring”; songs aren’t produced, they’re “scored.”

This slight reserve spilled over to the early part of Ludacris’s performance, when normally springy songs like “Southern Hospitality” and “Ho” fell flat. Even after delivering his dazzling remix verses from Shawty Lo’s “Dey Know” and DJ Khaled’s “I’m So Hood,” Ludacris had barely broken a sweat. Maybe he was willing to waste only so much energy on rap.

But then came “I Do It for Hip Hop,” a self-consciously lo-fi celebration of precapitalist creativity that on Ludacris’s new album, features his fellow millionaires Jay-Z and Nas.

“I don’t do it for the money/I do it from the heart,” Ludacris rapped. “The van Gogh flow/Luda do it ’cause it’s art.”

Then, quite unexpectedly, all those faux-naïf rhymes came true. A cavalcade of guests emerged to take the stage for a few moments each, a showcase of New York hip-hop history with a devoted fan as curator. It turned this show on its ear.

L L Cool J’s “Rock the Bells” was invigorating, and Jadakiss’s “We Gon Make It” sounded like rolling thunder. When Jim Jones and Juelz Santana emerged to perform “Pop Champagne,” the flamboyant hip-hop anthem of the moment, Ludacris felt comfortable enough to put art back aside for a second: “I made the Forbes list, yeah, I know you seen it/Eight figures so if I say it, you know I mean it.”

None of these guests currently sell more records than Ludacris, but it was clear that it was they who were doing him a favor, not the other way around. With all his fame, his millions of albums sold and his Southern pride, all Ludacris really wanted was one night in the New York trenches.