On the Download: Kane Mayfield’s Mobtown Studios Microshow
On the Download: Kane Mayfield’s Mobtown Studios Microshow
Last Thursday’s Mobtown Studios microshow from Mania Music Group’s Kane Mayfield and a live band—guitarist Karlos Brickhouse, keyboardist Dennard Watson, drummer Brandon Segar, and trombonist Patrick Harrison—is now available for download at
Kane begins with a snappy, near Neptunes-like take on his recent single “Wreck,” and from there makes everybody sing the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel Air, raps his own storytelling rap, and slides into a darkly comic poem about multiple personalities called “H.I.M”—each verse punctuated a screaming declaration of, “I ain’t fucking crazy!” Here’s Mayfield, known for rapping his ass off and cracking jokes, performing near-spoken-word about mental illness: hardly your typical rap show. Mayfield returns to rapping with “Reaganomics,” featuring one of his darkest, funniest couplets (“Rich people don’t have our problems/ they don’t know unless we rob them”) and then he calls for a liquor break.
Emmanuel Lewis-Withers performs a two-song suite of love songs while Mayfield, presumably, boozes it up. When Kane returns for the second half, he announces, “The romantic
part of this show is over. Now we about to fuck something and get crazy.” He’s only half-serious. The second half, however, is indeed a collection of songs investigating love in its many forms, from lovey-dovey to stalker-scary to heartwarming: courtship rap “Headbussa,” a love poem worthy of a restraining order, a freestyle over the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You” (with Lewis-Withers singing the hook), the cry-for-empathy “Poor George,” and a tribute to his mother and brother called “Flowers.”
The show ends with a 15-minute pentecostal cover of BrownFish’s “F.I.S.H. Bowl,” with Jahiti from the Baltimore reggae-rap group joining in and taking over. Mayfield adds some working-class raps to the song but mostly shouts along to its desperate, paranoid hook: “We’re living in a fish bowl.” Willing to hand the show over to others for entire segments like that, and ready to wander away from rap for crowd sing-alongs, dirty jokes, and some spoken-word, Kane at Mobtown Studios is more like a charming, do-whatever variety show than a straight hip-hop performance.