For the last four summers OC and I have been meeting up at the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival to enjoy great music, good food and networking with dope people. He comes from Connecticut and I troop down from Upstate New York. It's become a tradition of sorts. One that we both look forward to.
Each year as we've gotten the feel for the festival, our camera arsenal has also grown (well, OC's has) and so we're able to expand our coverage of the event. This year we headed out to Brooklyn with three photographers (myself, OC and 3feetofanger) on a mission. Eight hours. 500 pictures. These are some of our best shots.
Before we get to the pics, I wanted to sum up the event in two categories, highlights and low-lights.
Highlights:
- Seeing TMB favorites Clear Soul Forces, Chuuwee and Charmingly Ghetto rock the BHF stage with ScienZe and Dutch Rebelle.
- Witnessing live A Tribe Called Quest and Leaders of The New School on the same stage for the first time in decades.
- Slick Rick, Smif-n-Wessun and others rocking with Busta Rhymes, one of the greatest performers of our time, alongside his longtime hypeman Spliff Star.
Low-lights:
- Tickets for this year's final day jumped from $15 to $30, which turned off some folks. Still an affordable event considering the headliner and his guest but something I heard a lot of negativity about.
- Even with a higher ticket price, Saturday's show didn't have nearly the amount of performances as they've had in previous years, which led to too much downtime in between sets and prior to Busta Rhymes finally taking the stage.
- The folks at Brooklyn Bodega, who run the event, granted us press passes. That was dope. But we didn't realize those passes provided limited access to the press pit in front of the stage once the headliner hit the stage. So we ultimately got booted because that area suddenly became only accessible to all access badge holders. This could have reduced the quality of our pics. Good thing we're nice like that though and worked it out. Ha! But yeah, this info wasn't communicated to us and that was kind of lame.
All and all, it was a cool event. Not nearly as great as previous years overall. But as I mentioned, there were a gang of dope moments, many we caught on camera. Peep the visuals after the jump.
