Ces Cru Plus Info Gates
Kansas City Hip-Hop Duo
Wednesday, June 25 - open dance floor
8 pm ; $15 adv, $17 day of show; 18+
If you like Ces Cru, consider:
Rakim - Jul 19
Gyptian - Aug 10
There were times when more hip-hop albums sounded like this, like Ces Cru's Constant Energy Struggles, the Kansas City's duo debut full-length album on Strange Records. There were times when albums were formulated around concepts big and small, dedicated to pushing envelopes, sharing pin-pointed messages and built around lyrical conceits that required intense listening, confident rhyme flows that created new patters, music that thumped and bumped and pounded and grooved. Those times are not now, but Constant Energy Struggles arrives in this moment - sounding not like an anachronism or a revival, but a celebration of a lineage that, while overshadowed by other aspects of hip-hop, has continued to evolve and progress outside of the mainstream.
It's only fitting that Ces Cru - comprised of rappers Godemis and Ubiquitous- would release Constant Energy Struggles. For the past dozen years, the two have operated mostly as a duo, all that remained of the much larger Ces Cru.
"Ces Cru was a collective of like-minded individuals," says Godemis, a founding member of the group since high school. When he first began rhyming, he was simply doing cover versions of albums like Mac Mali's Illegal Business? "The thing at the time was to be able to learn the rhyme and not only know the lyrics, but to be able to spit them at the same capacity as the record. It was like having a guitar and learning a solo." One day, during his sophomore year, while he was reciting some Boot Camp Clik verses, a classmate who was already rhyming, gave him some backhanded encouragement : Oh that's cool, but you should write his your own shit. "He said it like he was the shit because he was writing his own stuff and I wasn't," Godemis recalls. Not long after, a friend approached Godemis with headphones and let him hear a verse he had recorded over Das Efx's "Microphone Master." That night Godemis wrote his first rhyme. Soon enough, Ces Cru began to take root.
https://www.strangemusicinc.com