Tampa Calling

Here’s a review from new contributor Arielle Stevenson.

CONCERT REVIEW

BY ARIELLE STEVENSON

Mickey Avalon, Wed., July 18, Orpheum, Ybor City

He’s not the boy to bring home to momma, but Mickey Avalon, along with cohorts Dirt Nasty and Andre Legacy, easily entertained a nearly full house Wednesday at the Orpheum. Avalon’s graphic, drug-touting lyrics would probably give Tipper Gore a massive stroke, but they worked the packed room into a frenzy. DJ Leggo, another member of the on stage posse, aptly described the star of the show as: “If Iggy Pop and the Beastie Boys had a baby, it’d be Mickey Avalon.” Avalon’s music also recalls early Eminem.

With Leggo on laptop issuing the beats they all had a hand in producing, Avalon worked the crowd of mainly indie-gone-wild college girls, going as far as making out with several of them. When he busted out his best known ditty, “Jane Fonda,” which has been featured on HBO’s Entourage series, the hipsters actually shook their asses.

Avalon is a master of raw, sordid street tales. Subject matter includes sex, suicide and 80s fitness queens. Leggo described his music as “glam-rap.” Avalon closed his set with a performance of “My Dick”, which features the chorus “we got dicks like Jesus” and is set to sparse, old school beats. It’s still up in the air whether hip-hop will embrace Avalon’s genre-busting sound and lines like “I had a princess, queen of incest,
she was inbred but Jean had big breasts.”

But I highly doubt that the formerly homeless rapper, or his dick, will be loosing any sleep worrying about it.

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