EMERGENCE

Invincible at the Emergence DXSW Showcase
By CAIT STUFF, Pop Damage

Detroit hip-hop artist Invincible released her first record (ShapeShifters) in 2008, but for those with an ear for Detroit style rap, it was an album that we’d been wanting for a decade. The last time I had managed to get my hands on some of Invincible’s recordings was in 2002, downloaded off of limewire, in the days when local artists from a city you no longer lived in were hard to find. And the last time I had seen her perform live was in the mid-nineties, both of us still teenagers at the time. As a result, seeing her name on the SXSW Detroit showcase at Victory Grill Thursday night was like a blast from the past, a show that, despite how exhausted I already was from earlier events in the day, I knew I couldn’t afford to miss.

If Eminem hadn’t traded his reputation as a musician for shock politics and personal drama, Detroit rap might have found its rightful place on the national stage. If it had, Invicible might well be a national name by now. Instead, while D12’s Obie Trice and 50-Cent have traded in their Detroit sound for some half-rate Yankee attempt at crunk, Invincible stays true to her roots. It turns out that much of the decade-long wait for her first album has been necessitated by her reluctance to buy into big-label politics, and Thursday night’s Detroit showcase was largely the product of her own self-created label, Emergence. From everything I heard Thursday night, the waiting and private effort required to make her music independently of big rap contracts has been well worth it.

The crowd at Victory Grill were intense in their focus on the stage. Although there was certainly beer being served, it was probably the least partying crowd I encountered all week. These people were here to listen first and party second, if they were partying at all. Invincible took the stage after an impassioned introduction from Finale in which he repeatedly thanked her for putting the evening together. He then stayed on stage with Invincible throughout her set, backing her up on “Sledgehammer,” as well as the tracks he is featured in on the ShapeShifters album. That the two of them work well together is obvious, and I look forward to more collaborative pieces from them in the future. The evening ended with a joint performance of “Locusts,” an incredibly intelligent look at the politics of eminent domain in Detroit, in which Finale delivered the amazing line “I’m not trying to rap, I’m time traveling.”

Visibly, Invincible has changed little in the intervening decade, small but tough, age impossible to pin down if you didn’t already know it. Lyrically she’s improved, but how much is hard to say, as she was more skilled than many professionals around her even then. Detroit rap is word-heavy when compared to other regional rap styles, but the density of Invincible’s rhymes is intense even by Detroit standards. She spits rhymes like a master of tongue twisters, with the vocal control and enunciation to let you know that she could keep this pace up for as long as it takes to get your attention. And once she’s got that, you immediately realize that she’s not just about the sound — the lyrics she’s spitting are so angry, intelligent and socially aware they make other “rap for smart people” artists (like Atmosphere) sound like they’re singing about ice cream or days in the week. Lyrics like “Mental telepathy/Possess him with her recipe/To make him feel some empathy/Hears her thinking ‘set us free’” display a complexity of thought, a willingness to see and explore the grey area between what we think about a person and what they’re actually thinking that’s rare in any musical genre. Given the utterly brainless vocals that crunk-influenced radio rap has been producing, Invincible’s show was more than just a blast from the past, but a renewed hope for the future of hip-hop.