Gangstagrass
About this Event
Super Spectacular Supporter Doors: 6 PM
General Admission Doors: 6:30 PM
***Super Spectacular Supporter ticket Includes early admission (30 minutes before GA doors), chance to purchase exclusive limited-edition merch, and pre-show hangout with band.
Gangstagrass is an Americana Voltron. Take a little of everything that's great about this country, its creativity, its ingenuity, the strength of its people in overcoming struggles, and put it into musical form. That's Gangstagrass, a bluegrass hip-hop collective.
Hear "bluegrass hip-hop collective" and you might think you already know what that sounds like. You don't, not until you're in the room hearing it happen.
The bluegrass pick (instrumentalists in a circle, freestyling solos) and the hip-hop cypher (MCs in a circle, freestyling verses) are basically the same thing, and Gangstagrass unites them. Over brilliant banjo & fiddle and dope beats, the MCs bring sharp multi-layered lyrics. And much of what you hear at a Gangstagrass show is spun on the spot about the events of the day, the local sports teams, or even the hat you're wearing in the front row.
The New York Times devoted a full page to Gangstagrass under the headline "This Is the Music America Needs."
These genre rebels are the most controversial bluegrass group on the scene. Known for the Emmy-nominated theme to the show Justified, Gangstagrass is the only band in history to bring real hip-hop MCs to #1 on the Billboard bluegrass chart. They've done it with TWO albums: the first time with No Time for Enemies, and then again with The Blackest Thing on the Menu, which the Grammys reclassified into the "Best Rap Album" category the same week it hit #1 on the bluegrass chart.
What Gangstagrass shows people, kids and adults alike, is that things they were taught belong in separate boxes can make each other better instead. Once you see that happen with music, you start wondering what else doesn't have to stay separate.
Over its decade-plus as a world-touring band, Gangstagrass has spent countless weeks on the Top 10 bluegrass chart, received UNESCO's International Innovator Award, and taught workshops for kids K-12, college students, and adults at national conferences. The band has been featured on PBS and covered by Forbes, Vice, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Rolling Stone, and praised in publications dedicated to hip-hop, to bluegrass, and to Americana. The common thread of it all is that Gangstagrass brings people together across political, racial, socioeconomic, geographic, and generational lines.
Gangstagrass is loved by everyone: little kids, teens, parents, grandparents, by bluegrass fans and by hip-hop heads. Eighty-year-olds and seven-year-olds alike dance their hearts out at a Gangstagrass show. People who love both bluegrass and hip-hop are delighted to finally hear them together in the same songs, and people who don't usually care for either genre find themselves loving what Gangstagrass does anyway.
This IS the music America needs, and no two nights sound the same. With solos that catch fire in new ways and verses built fresh from whatever's happening in the room and in the world right then, the show you'll see here is a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 18.71 to USD 55.23
