My Weekend With Local Rappers And Hip-Hop Photographers, And How The Moogfest Gentrificaton Narrative Is Too Often A Lazy Cliché
It is not an exaggeration to say this was one of my favorite weekends ever.
On Thursday night, after seeing Blood Orange play an 80-foot-wide outdoor stage that didn’t exist three days earlier, I saw Ryan Hemsworth finish his groovy, head-nodding set at the Armory with Chance The Rapper’s “No Problem,” to which everyone predictably lost their mind. On Friday night, just two blocks away from my house, I stood behind the ebullient afro of Reggie Watts as we both took in a mesmerizing GZA set inside MotorCo. Hours earlier, I had watched Professor Toon and Well$ play probably two of the best shows I’ve seen from them, to a crowd that was more energized and engaged from start to finish than anything I’m used to seeing at local shows. Saturday night, I took pictures from press row as GZA played his second consecutive night, this time on the outdoor stage. Once again, I had to pinch myself that this 2,000-person gathering was all happening in a parking lot through which I often walk my dog.
As I sipped on the lone remaining PBR tall boy from my fridge this morning (read: 3 p.m.) recounting these and other events of the weekend, it occurred to me that as amazing as many of the events were, I was equally grateful to the festival for simply giving me an opportunity to hang out with a lot of people I don’t get to see enough of, in this case rappers, producers, clothiers, bloggers and photographers, many of whom I’d met while running my clothing brand and store, Thrill City, in Chapel Hill between 2011 and 2015. It’s something that I immediately agreed with when I saw DJ Forge sum it up in a single tweet:
Honestly, the best part about Moogfest has been hanging out with my friends that I don't get to see as often as I should
— FORGE (@djforge)
May 20, 2016
I think I know Forge well enough to safely assume that a good number of the friends he was referring to are not white. Most of the friends who made my weekend awesome are not white. And yet that didn’t stop members of local media and a parade of snarky tweeters (like a termite or cockroach infestation, Durham surely has legions more below the surface that we haven’t seen yet) from dishing out tired “outside investment/gentrification/NIMBY” tropes in the run up to the festival last week, with the idea that Moogfest is part of a downtown expansion that pushes common people out of the way to make room for a plutocratic playground enjoyed by white, male, venture capitalists.
It’s not a narrative in Durham that I completely disagree with, or one that we shouldn’t talk about. But as it relates to Moogfest in particular, my experience this weekend tells a very different story. You may not think of Moogfest as particularly hip-hop, and it is obviously a far cry from a black festival, but I can say this without equivocation: of the artists, creatives, managers, photographers and more in the NC hip-hop community that I’ve connected with over the past few years, I’ve never seen so many of them in such a small radius, over one weekend.
So who is destroying our local culture, again?
Most of the friends I spent the past weekend with are very young (less than 24 years old, some as young as 18), they are largely non-white, and they are very, very far from the average attendee annual income of $100,000+ that Moogfest boasts about to its potential sponsors and partners. They are not invading Durham from all corners of the world to transform our local culture against our will — they’re from around our area and around our state, more likely from the Triad than Tribeca.
And I’m not talking about just one or two examples. It got to a point this weekend when I stopped even having to wonder if various friends from the hip-hop scene would be wandering the streets of Durham — by part-way through Friday night, I could safely assume they were.
King Phill, founder of style and culture blog Cool&WellDressed, and someone I rarely get to see, was in town from Greensboro shooting for Infinite Magazine, as was Charlotte’s Dave Has Wingz, another writer, clothing designer and photographer who I hadn’t hung out with in more than a year. Tommy Coyote, a 19-year-old well-known in the hip-hop circles for his popular Instagram account (10k followers and counting, bolstered by his recent months as a tour photographer for Derek Luh) was visiting from Apex, working as one of Moogfest’s lead photographers. He and 18-year-old photographer Basile Shingu both spent multiple nights in Moogfest’s American Tobacco basement doc studio, grinding out work for the festival, and it was awesome to see how much fun they were having. Of course my longtime friends and collaborators Justin Laidlaw and Gabe Get$ of RUNAWAY were out and about, their brand new shop getting Official Moogfest Merch Store treatment just a couple months removed from opening day. I ran into or spent time with Father MIKE, Crystal Taylor, and Chelsey Bentley — all of them active and engaged members of the local hip-hop community.
Oh right, and the artists themselves.
Greensboro-based JK The Reaper was in town to perform as part of Denzel Curry’s Friday Night MotorCo set, which followed near-flawless performances from Durham’s Professor Toon and Chapel Hill’s Well$. Toon and Well$ would perform again on Saturday night with Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn (aka MADE OF OAK) on the festival main stage, something that should have made any North Carolina music fan happy. Durham’s Kid Infamous and Danny Blaze were in the crowd for GZA’s indoor show, Charlotte’s Will Wildfire played an unofficial backyard party, Defacto Thezpian spent time dishing out albums and politicking with Well$ backstage, producer Cocique popped up throughout the weekend with his perfectly groomed manbun, Trandle showed off his hoverboard skills behind The Pinhook, Toon’s DJ Shahzad went nuts next to me during the aforementioned Ryan Hemsworth set, Bull City emcee The Real Laww was everywhere, Raleigh rapper and producer Brassious Monk caught Lunice from a couple rows in front of me, and rapper Austin Royale (formerly A-10) rolled around with JK and Denzel Curry.
Every time I turned around I was bumping into someone I hadn’t seen in weeks, if not months, or was meeting through a mutual friend for the first time. And rarely did the person I was bumping into match the archetypal Moogfest attendee I’ve been programmed to dread: white, wealthy, uninvested in Durham or Triangle culture. As I stood on the back side of Ninth Street Bakery on Saturday watching a group of young people all hanging out because of Moogfest — Tommy taking pictures of Shahzad and Gabe as they stood against a brick wall, Well$ crouching between them with skateboard in hand, all of them mean-mugging for the lens — it hit me how bizarre and out-of-touch our local cultural commentary has become. If railing against the socio-cultural implications of Moogfest is now the standard position of Durham’s counter-culture, it’s truly surreal to consider what is, by definition, now the Establishment: Moogfest-affiliated skaters, rappers, and clothing lines that feature designs like a skeleton lying in a coffin with two women.
These opinions do not come without some important disclaimers, chief among them that Moogfest provided my ticket, as well as many of my meals, over the weekend, as well as full access that made it easy to jump between green rooms, rooftop viewing areas and press pits, as part of a documentary I'm working on with Moogfest and RUNAWAY. This undoubtedly colors the way I look back at the weekend as a whole.
Due to my proximity to all the venues, I saw more of the festival than I have of any other festival in my life, so when I say “I saw more members of the hip-hop community at Moogfest than I’ve ever seen anywhere,” although it is a true statement from me, it should not be taken to mean there isn’t a similar camaraderie at, say, Hopscotch. I’ve just never been able to spend a full weekend there.
Lastly, I realize that the couple dozen people I described here are but one small window into the thousands of attendees who descended upon Durham this weekend, and likely do not speak to a larger trend. Therefore, this essay is not meant to present an omniscient, all-encompassing rejection of the Moogfest/gentrification storyline, but rather provide a glimpse into how, at least within one small community, that premise fell spectacularly flat.
I’ve grown incredibly tired of the cliché — often propagated by progressive white people with largely white social circles who enjoy the social benefits of a semi-gentrified city (LGBTQ-friendly businesses, responsibly sourced food, microbreweries galore) — that Moogfest, and any other fun and exciting thing for that matter, is a harbinger of a corporate takeover tearing at the fabric of our little multi-cultural utopia. To hear some of these people opine about Moogfest, it’s as if NewsCorp has just broken ground on a new headquarters in the old Durham Bulls outfield.
We should question, we should challenge, we should critique. But before spouting opinions from 25,000 feet up, we must also engage on the ground level. Ask some of the people I spent the weekend with, and you’ll likely find that, like me, they had an amazing time. To hear their answer, though, you’d have to take a break from speaking on their behalf.









