Joanna Newsom: Best Rapper Alive?

by Jarrett Martineau | February 1, 2008 at 03:26 pm

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I had the immense privilege of seeing Joanna Newsom perform at the Pop Montreal festival in 2006, soon after the release of her magnificent album Ys. Having listened to her cryptically opaque, playfully verbose, and ultimately epic lyrics on record, I was floored by the affective power of her live poetic performance.

As a huge hip-hop fan, I'm both a sucker (and a stickler) for quality lyricism - and I was absolutely overwhelmed by Newsom's verbal dexterity. I even had the same exhilarating thought as I left the show -- "Joanna Newsom: Best Rapper Alive?"

Apparently I'm not the only one.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music hummed with anticipation last night. One row ahead of me in the hipster-heavy crowd, Saturday Night Live clowns Andy Samberg, Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer whispered and giggled to one another. The formally attired players of the Brooklyn Philharmonic filed quietly on stage. And the sold-out house burst into fevered applause when the night's star strode out from the wings: Indie-folk harpist Joanna Newsom, here to play her 2006 masterpiece Ys in its entirety on the next-to-last date of a world tour.

Ys (pronounced "eess") is a profoundly strange piece of music, perhaps even more so in a live setting. The Philharmonic brought composer Van Dyke Parks' psychedelic orchestral arrangements to head-spinning life as Newsom led them through the album's five meandering suites. And Newsom's dexterous dance with her harp strings was, as always, impressive. But her sheer verbal wizardry was what really drove the show — her ability to recite an hour's worth of dense, passionate poetry without missing a beat. Newsom is one of the few musicians who's really, truly unlike anyone else at all. Still, the way she unleashed those great gusts of language made her seem something like an ancient rhapsode unspooling Homer from memory, or Dylan at his far-out '66 peak, or maybe Lil Wayne on a particularly peak-quality mixtape bender. (Joanna Newsom: Best rapper alive?)