You know you're in for a little intensity when, before the show even starts, a voice over the speakers pleads with the audience not to use flares or smoke bombs. If anyone does, security will have no choice but to evacuate the venue. The announcement is probably made at every stop on the tour, but at the Bataclan it carries particular weight.
Fears of a “Smoke on the Water”-type incident are about the only classic-rock thing here. OsamaSon is young, and emphatically for the young. Like much of the current underground hip-hop scene, his music treats rap as a starting point rather than a set of boundaries, and metal is very much part of the equation. The religious imagery, indecipherable logo, darkness, moshing, circle pits and headbanging are obvious enough, but the connection goes deeper than cosmetics. The music is brutally loud and distorted, with growls and screams buried among beats that frequently seem designed less to make you nod your head than cave your chest in.
It is one of the most interesting characteristics of this generation of musicians. Everything is available to them at once. Rap, metal, punk, emo, EDM, pop, music from last week or thirty years ago: streaming and social media have flattened the old divisions and OsamaSon's generation seems largely uninterested in rebuilding them. Nothing is automatically too cheesy, too heavy, too lame or too cool to use. The absence of snobbery is refreshing.
As a live performance, however, this is a peculiar thing. OsamaSon is alone onstage, thrashing around while backing tracks provide most of the actual music. He grabs pieces of rhymes, growls, screams and periodically yells “Paris!” His most important contribution may be “Open this bitch up!”, repeated throughout the night as an instruction to widen the pit and lose whatever restraint remains.
It works. From the first beat, the Bataclan is fucking mental. The floor becomes a sweltering furnace of bodies, most of them apparently having abandoned clothing above the waist. People mosh, jump, collide and hurl themselves into the music while the air grows thick with sweat and, quite possibly, some illegal party favours. We wouldn't know.
By conventional standards, there isn't much of a concert taking place onstage. Most of the music is prerecorded and OsamaSon's live vocal contributions are intermittent. Yet the connection between performer and audience is absolute. He knows exactly how to manipulate the energy in the room, and the crowd knows exactly what is expected of it. As an event, as a conduit for catharsis and for connection, it is a resounding success. As live music however, the real performance is on the floor.
