Rap on the North Side
The business of live hip-hop on the north side has had its ups and downs over the past month. In late October Ice Cube played two sold-out shows at the China Club. The unapologetic gangster rapper was the biggest hip-hop name yet to play the upscale dance den, and the show was a success for booker Mike Yerke, who conceived the gig, made the deal with Cube’s people, and pulled off the shows with no trouble in front of a mixed audience. Nice, right? One problem: the show was Yerke’s swan song. A few hours before Ice Cube’s first show, he was told that the club’s direction was changing and that he was out of a job.
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Yerke is now out on the street and working to pull off his own shows–like a pair of George Clinton concerts at the Cubby Bear December 16 and 17. He maintains that there’s money to be made from hip-hop shows. “It’s an art form I really like, but that, of course, doesn’t keep the doors open,” he says. “There’s an audience out there: it sells a lot of records. But you have to know how to do it.”
Last Friday marked the north-side appearance of an artist whose newest record debuted at number five on the Billboard charts and still nestles in the top ten with the likes of Pearl Jam and Janet Jackson. But be-cause he’s a gangster rapper–because he’s Eazy-E, cofounder of the ultimate hard-core rap outfit, N.W.A.–his appearance at the Riviera came with far less fanfare than one might suppose. The show wasn’t confirmed until less than a week before the concert. Hundreds of thousands of white kids buy Eazy-E albums, but the 1,200 kids at the Riviera, says promoter Domingo Neris, were virtually all black. Twelve hundred tickets wasn’t a sellout in the huge Riv, but it was a profitable show, says Neris–and a peaceful one. Eazy-E is the biggest name yet for the young hip-hop entrepreneur, who got into the business straight out of high school. He began throwing DJ parties after seeing other organizers screw up. “They’d say this person was going to be there, but this person would never show up, you know what I’m saying? I thought I could provide a better product and give them better quality for the same amount of bucks,” he says.
