Recap: City Kings: Bad Boy vs. Roc-a-Fella
by Felice Leon
August 13, 2012
Link: http://thefabempire.com/2012/08/13/recap-city-kings-bad-boy-vs-roc-a-fella/
The Dekalb Market gets turned out yet again. On Saturday, DJ CEO and the Noir Music Series came together to produce City Kings: Bad Boy vs. Roc-a-Fella. Other sponsors and supporters of the event included Mazie’s Bites, House of art Gallery, YRB, and DW World Media. This group called upon DJ Moma and DJ CEO to represent for Brooklyn in hopes of answering the age-old question, ‘where Brooklyn at?’
City Kings was very well attended. It yielded a young predominately Black semi-artsy, semi-professional crowd. Same venue, same recycled shipping containers, same vendors, but this was nothing like the crowd that we’ve seen at a previous event hosted at the Dekalb Market.
For the low, low price of $5ish (I could have swore that I heard a request for $6 at the door, though the Facebook page quoted the event to be $5) you could bump to the Notorious B.I.G.,Diddy, The Lox, Mase, Lil’ Kim, Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, and Memphis Bleek (what ever happened to Bleek?). Moma and CEO were putting in work for the crowd to twerk. These brothers literally played hit after hit of classics from these prolific rappers. Good times!
The ladies looked good, the guys were cool, but to my chagrin, the crowd was not consistently dancing… what’s up with that? There was plenty of two-stepping and even pockets of people that were ‘getting down’, but collectively the crowd just wouldn’t budge. I was floored. Though, when CEO and Moma dropped the song “Mercy,” a heavy bounce came over the crowd, yet, it didn’t last very long.
Moral of the story: partygoers please don’t disrespect your DJ’s by standing there looking at him/her. DJs perform to make people move, not to host a karaoke night. City Kings had all of the right components, to become a par-tay: good DJs, good venue, good (and attractive) people. The only thing missing was the foot twerk.