The joe vs. M83
w/ Belgium, Failing Esther, Kenton Jeske. Sat, Jan 12 (8pm). Jekyll & Hyde Pub (10610 100 Ave). Tickets: $10

Ah, the sweet smell of the New Year. Throughout the slew of “Best and Worst of 2007” recaps in print, television, and on the radio, one theme has rung out more clearly and consistently than all the rest: the lack of relevant hip-hop produced last year. Some critics have gone so far to call into question the longevity of the genre as a whole, and wonder whether 2007 will be remembered as the year when hip-hop finally wore out every trick in its book. 

So what better time for local rapper Joe Gurba—better known by his alias, The Joe—to revitalize local hip hop and kickstart 2008 with a live mashup set with none other than... M83?

No, M83 is not some long-lost New York MC that Gurba has raised from the dead for one night. They’re a French electro/shoegaze outfit—their 2003 album Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts showed up on a lot of critics’ best-of-the-year lists—and Gurba is sampling some their best-known material and complementing their spacey, psychedelic beats with his own esoteric, ethereal rhyming style.

“It’s the ideal production for an electronic hip-hop album,” Gurba says. “There’s parts where it’s really atmospheric. Their music is pretty epic; it’s big, big music, really exciting, the way hip-hop should be.”

And it’s also, he says, what the genre hasn’t been lately. The Joe isn’t alone in his dissatisfaction with the state of hip-hop. When a genre becomes more about an artist’s clothes and hos than the art he’s making, alarm bells should be going off at a deafening volume; in the case of hip-hop, the opposite has happened. But The Joe still stands behind the genre.

“Where most music is connected to the heart, hip-hop is more of an intellectual thing,” Gurba says. Which isn’t to imply that it’s lacking in soul: in fact, that’s precisely what led him to incorporate his rhymes with M83’s music in the first place. “If you think about hip-hop and this whole concept, [what I’m doing] doesn’t go against anything hip-hop stands for. Hip-hop was just an evolution of other genres, it’s all sample-based—it’s all been birthed out of the strength of other genres, like jazz and funk. It’s really a collaborative genre. Almost every single rap record has collaborations—sometimes too many.”

This particular “collaboration” has set in motion another chapter in The Joe’s career: following his M83 live set, Gurba plans to release a free online mixtape featuring beats all lifted from songs by prominent indie artists. “You know that song ‘Brother,’ by The Organ?” Joe asks. “I can rap to that. Jens Lekman, Modest Mouse... I hear certain things about that music I can rap to. It was natural to move into this. When you look at true hip-hop, it meets indie rock in the same way. It’s just trying to be pure and innovative.”