Ghostface Killah Hits Highs and Lows at Velvet Jones

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Poor Ghostface Killah. After the legendary emcee and his entourage tore through the first several songs of their Saturday-night set at Velvet Jones—including the great “Be Easy” from 2006’s Fishscale—a visibly sick Ghost approached the front of the stage with a confession. “They told me I had to come out here and do this show tonight. Hey, I can barely move. … My name is Iron Man—Tony Starks. And y’all gotta be my battery, ’cause when my battery run out, I run out.” Performers always say they feed off the crowd, but rarely has the fuel/fire relationship been so explicit.

Steve Barr

Wu-Tang Clan's Cappadonna (left) provides some much-needed backup to Ghostface Killah's (right) Saturday-night performance at Velvet Jones.

The comment was fitting and symbolic coming from the 39-year-old rapper, who, after two decades with hip-hop fraternity Wu-Tang Clan, apparently believes that rap music’s electricity ran out a long time ago. “Nothing inspires me anymore,” he told the audience during a rant against contemporary rappers. “It’s all just bullshit.” Ghostface has never been shy about his disappointment with today’s tunes. When he was at the top of his game as a solo artist, he told the Onion’s offshoot, the A.V. Club, “Fuck hip-hop. I ain’t feeling that shit right now. I don’t even listen to hip-hop. I just do this shit because I gotta feed my family.”

There was another battery hard at work on Saturday night, though: nostalgia. And that’s not simply a reference to the shout-outs to Biggie, Tupac, and other past greats. The selections from Ghostface’s newest album, Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, offered fans beats and mixes that sounded better suited to Barry White than a hardcore rapper.

Ghostface possesses a voice that, under normal circumstances, shoots through the mix like a harpoon. At Velvet Jones, however, other forces took over. His co-emcees sometimes commanded the stage for him, and 2007 Wu-Tang inductee Cappadonna—packing a Jason Voorhees mask and 36 chambers of thuggish charisma—carried the group and traded lines with the front row at point-blank range while the main man hung back to swig from a water bottle and check his cell phone—even during his old troupe’s classics, like “C.R.E.A.M.” “Where my Duracell at?” Cappadonna shouted at one point, attempting to jolt the crowd. Maybe Iron Man could use a recharge before his next show.

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