To hear frontman Kevin Abstract call his collective “America’s favorite boy band” is deceptive — but so is Brockhampton.
Although they are often compared to the Los Angeles rap group Odd Future, Brockhampton, who were featured on Viceland’s “American Boyband” series, are adamant about their boy band status after independently releasing three albums in one year. Fresh from a three-night run in New York City and their first television performance on MTV, Brockhampton performed to a sold out crowd at the House of Blues on Monday night.
As soon as the group stepped onstage in their orange jumpsuits, the floor turned into a mosh pit. Brockhampton opened with “Boogie,” their jiving tag-team dance track, sending the audience into waves of movement.
The euphoria of Brockhampton’s fans rivals the intensity of the One Direction fandom, if the One Direction fandom were older, more male and rap-oriented. The mosh pit was the defining feature of the audience experience. Although mosh pits are relatively new to hip-hop, they are not unheard of. The crowd’s enthusiasm reflected the expansive energy of the members onstage, who performed with the athleticism and charisma of an NBA team on a winning streak.
One of the most fascinating things about Brockhampton is their democratic group dynamic. The group’s earliest members first met in 2010 on the internet forum KanyeLive. This motley creative unit, which includes rapper-singers Kevin Abstract, Ameer Vann, Matt Champion, Joba, Bearface and Dom McLennon, also credits their webmaster, Roberto, as a mainstay. Whatever ego the group portrays as a collective does not translate to over-prioritization of individual members.
Organic onstage hijinks abounded, with the performers joking around, breaking into impromptu chants and chiding their audience. Playing the role of capricious court jester, Abstract alternated between praising his fans for their energy and insulting the quality of the mosh pit. Claiming that “at a Brockhampton concert, f— you means I love you,” he particularized the punk intimacy between audience and performer, the kind of intimacy many music fans desire to have with their boy band of choice yet never achieve.
Rap is often still not granted the same cultural reverence as whiter music, but Brockhampton proclaim themselves a boy band, and seek to reclaim and refurbish definitions of power in music. Now exceedingly popular, rap far outsteps rock music, yet most would assume that a boy band could not include rap artists. It might be easy to just call the group rappers, but to define Brockhampton as any one genre is not accurate.
They are straight, gay, black, white and Asian. They rap about misogyny in hip-hop on one song (Matt Champion in “Junky”) and slam down sexualized, objectifying lyrics on the next (Ameer Vann and Merlyn Wood in “Gold”). They are juxtaposition and tension, driving beats and corkscrew chords, punk, rap and pop music. They are one guitar solo, in the middle of the show, a walking, democratic contradiction that only the internet could have catalyzed.
During the encore, in which they played their track “Star” five times, the group suddenly called all audience members that had copied their blue face/orange jumpsuit look to join them onstage for the final performance. Two College of Arts and Sciences sophomores, Aneesha Pydi and Gargi Pandey, were pulled onstage by members of the band, alongside around 20 other fans. Pydi said the experience was one of the best things she has ever experienced.
“We were just so hyped, so euphoric, so unable to fathom what was happening,” Pydi said. “We were running around stage taking videos of each of the members singing, and they would turn to us and sing to our cameras, wave, smile, at us. Ameer Vann waved at Gargi. Matt Champion rapped his verse to me. Dom McLennon gave me a hug.”
Like the parents Kevin raps about wishing he had, Brockhampton plays with disapproval only to ultimately grant their praise and respect. To their sold-out crowds of young fans, the boys of Brockhampton are the kinds of intimate, loving figures Kevin would hold up, fittingly, on the Love Your Parents tour.
