Since I was a child, I’ve enjoyed plenty of summer days in New York City, but this was the first I experienced in Mamdani’s New York City. As I ate my way along a leisurely path from Penn Station to the Gramercy Theatre (a walking slice from Upside Pizza, noodles at 1915 Lanzhou Hand Pulled Noodles and a scoop at Caffè Panna), the city appeared to offer little resistance against his diabolical LGBTQ communism. Maybe the peculiar influx of discontinued Fisker cabs was his idea, too? The lack of wind-swirled street-garbage, sunburned/hungover Eagles fans and overt political cronyism left me homesick, but it was a taste of home that brought me here in the first place: Philly’s own Skrilla, celebrating the release of his new (digital-only) album, Z.

In my varied-yet-limited experience, live rap shows are often more miss than hit, which is odd because the music itself is indisputably America’s greatest cultural export. A mid-sized, all-ages Live Nation club venue just doesn’t seem like the place where the magic of hip-hop thrives, but I was willing to set aside my preconceptions (my personal disappointment beginning with a Jedi Mind Tricks show a quarter of a century ago) and see what this relatively youth-oriented billing could do. In case you live a lifestyle completely devoid of any contact with children, you might’ve missed that kids have been randomly yelling “six seven!” for the past year in pure adult-confounding bliss, a live-action meme originating from Skrilla’s breakout hit “Doot Doot (6 7)”. In our post sense-making culture, this makes perfect sense. About half of the people entering the club were actively smoking thick, cloudy weed, many of whom also sported big orthodontic braces on the teeth that sucked it in. Let’s get wanded, hand our leftover dumplings over to security, and head inside.

With a comfortable spot snagged up in the back-wall stadium seating, I was again reminded that the correlation between monthly Spotify listener metrics and asses in seats is unreliable at best. The show was originally booked at Brooklyn’s Warsaw; the last-minute move to the smaller Gramercy Theatre suggests underperforming ticket sales for this man of more than 640,000 Instagram followers. Virality alone doesn’t pay the bills! Nevertheless, a devoted crowd of a few hundred gathered toward the front of the stage and stayed put, their sporadic clouds of weed smoke and flashing orange embers resembling a pine forest smoldering the day after a ravaging fire. From my vantage point, I could see that the house engineer switched from a “Best of 2026” Spotify playlist to one more curated for the show, featuring multiple 1900Rugrat songs. The crowd got into the mood, singing along to “One Take Freestyle”, which would be played no fewer than three times throughout the night. By the third time, I couldn’t resist rapping along to the “booga suga” “coulda shoulda” couplet, but finally, look! Some guys quietly wandered onto the stage.

Announcing himself as Slumlord, Melly Frank$ kicked things off with little fanfare. His mix was bass-heavy yet quiet, a distorted jumble that contrasted poorly with the slickness of the preceding Spotify mix. Representing the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, I wished his music or performance came with the clarity it deserved, but the inexperience was self-evident; he just wasn’t there yet. Someone should’ve given his on-stage posse a pep-talk before getting out there, too – I’ve seen more energy in Group 6 of the American Airlines boarding line. Frank$’s allotted time was short, the same of which went for the next few performers. He was followed by an MC (whose name I still can’t figure out) whose performance shared a similar fate. (He kept referring to himself as “Don’t Call Me Lucky”, which the internet tells me is the name of a DJ Muggs album, so that can’t be it.) To that guy’s credit, he at least did a single dance move at the very end, which was the first time the crowd offered any sort of response. I thought the whole “no stage banter, don’t announce who you are, no audience reaction” thing was endemic of the disaffected Zoomer basement noise scene, but apparently this willful lack of crowd interaction has been spreading across genres like that new diarrhea virus.

Finally, some color: from the South Bronx comes Baby Osamaa, rolling with a crew of stage potatoes that looked like the guest judges on any given episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: over-the-top hair and makeup, giant pants, shiny miniskirts, neon everything. They mostly just milled about and halfheartedly filmed on their phones, but Baby Osamaa’s voice cut through the muddy mix nicely, at once both gravelly and high-pitched. (Does that make her the Axl Rose of rap?) I pictured a filthy air-conditioner filter where her esophagus should be, but she buzzed and spat with the energy of a fully-charged Orbeez gun, enthusiastically running tracks back at will and excited to be performing on stage for a crowd. Her grinning, unscripted chaos was precisely what the room needed. During her performance, a man seated near me appeared to be rolling what was an absolutely gigantic joint, that is until my eyes gathered their focus in the dim club lighting and I realized it was actually a Nathan’s hot dog (sold in the venue) he was preparing to devour.

With a quick switch between laptops, Happy Dranker took to the stage, wearing an unsettling white smiley-face mask: imagine a Slipknot x The Purge Halloween collab sold exclusively at Spencer’s Gifts. As if the prevailing mix wasn’t bad enough, he had to contend with a layer of plastic and synthetic fabric between his mouth and the mic, but I’d say he did his best. Happy Dranker’s flow is fast and sporadic, an anxious, irritated mumble that comes across alluringly sinister on Soundcloud but fails to fully translate through a cordless mic on stage. Why not take the extra step and have the sound-guy add some of that distinctive Percocet filter to the live vocal track? Happy Dranker was accompanied on stage by a guy whose sole purpose seemed to be slow-rolling a joint while vaguely miming along to the lyrics. It’s a move that would’ve been dangerous and cool if it was Gang Starr in 1994 under the threat of possible arrest and jail-time, but far less so when the audience is already happily smoking the legalized plant like chimneys. Like every other artist on the bill, Happy Dranker rapped over his complete studio vocal tracks rather than the instrumentals, a sub-karaoke cheat-move now so commonplace that I start to wonder if I’m the crazy person. I wasn’t aware of this young Philly rapper’s existence prior to the show, but a live performance should be more than just a means of notifying an audience that one’s digital presence exists, right? If it’s time to pass me a cup of ginger tea and tuck me into bed with the rest of the elderly and out-of-touch, please turn off the light on your way out.

Throughout the evening, paper-and-string versions of Skrilla’s trademarked face-mask were passed out to attendees and sported by many – such is the timeless joy of free promo swag. The effect was appealingly jarring, as people wore them behind or on the sides of their faces, resulting in the sense of being stared at by awkwardly-angled faces in the crowd. How would you feel if the back of some guy wearing a Geese t-shirt’s head was staring you down all night?? After even more 1900Rugrat on the house system, Skrilla emerged from the deepest posse of the night, and ostentatiously so, sporting a white button-up, black tie and American-flag version of his mask. Get the man some platform boots and he could’ve been up there kicking Twiggy Ramirez in the balls on the Mechanical Animals tour! With his sea of masked devotees ready to go off, Skrilla was rambunctious and magnetic, a far cry from the barely-coherent, drug-coma’d persona presented on YouTube. Under what was clearly an AI slop-vid of Playstation 5-style zombie horror, Skrilla ran through prior hits like “Blahdahdahdahdah” (my personal favorite) and material from Z, their fractured, dystopian, downright mournful beats disturbed into physicality by the enthusiastic phone-holding crowd. Compared to the opening acts or otherwise, Skrilla’s star-power was undeniable, blathering between songs good-naturedly, shouting out friends, and even bringing out Doodi Babby, the young Philly rapper who credits Skrilla with helping him escape street life. That’s not to be confused with The Doodie Baby, the queer Indian DJ and streetwear artist based out of Brooklyn. Two Doodie Babies!? This is the future that Mamdani wants.

It’s been a minute since I had to physically navigate around and over obstacles to get to a punk show. Packing two friends and two people I met moments earlier into my elder Rav 4, we cruised from South Philly to West Philly through a lengthy detour due to the recent and tragic collapse of a hospital parking garage (another sign of the times). This “ask a punk” generator gig was our destination. Its exact location was unclear due to the variety of flat, dry spots under or near the Grays Ferry bridge where a hundred punks could set up shop for a couple hours. We parked at a pavement-meets-gravel dead-end where a few other cars were spotted and walked along an unlit river path, turned around in doubt, met a couple other punks also in pursuit of the gig, circled back together, bypassed a large chainlink fence, hopped a smaller chainlink fence, and stumbled through a cliffside thicket, pursuing the steadily-growing murmur of idle punk behavior.

Our persistence was rewarded with Cleveland’s Yambag, who played shortly after what ended up being our perfectly-timed arrival. They play what I will accept as my favorite form of hardcore: blasting fast-core with grind and US ’82 influences. The singer’s bucket hat flew off within a couple songs and they absolutely flew through what must’ve been a lengthy selection of tunes, enough song titles to fill one of OFF!’s Dead Sea Scrolls-looking set-lists. Drummer Drew Vaccaro set his crash cymbals at a comical height ala Lucky Lehrer, and as I watched the right wrist of bassist Nick Kroh vibrating in place for twenty minutes straight, my own carpal tunnel symptoms started to flare up in empathy. As my friend pointed out, they were undeniably “tour tight”, and the crowd response was accordingly appreciative, full of unserious sideways speed-walking, fevered fist pumps, a small handful of firecrackers (which continue to follow Cleveland hardcore bands around since Nine Shocks Terror first cursed the city), and some of the weakest approximations of Ray Cappo’s iconic toe-touch jumps I’ve ever seen. It was glorious.

Reek Minds were next, and I want to take a moment to say that I love when bands have such a unified look that they could pass as siblings or cousins (or at least’d make sense crawling out of the same manhole). These shaved-head mooks look like they benchpress cinderblocks and eat collared-shirt wearers like me for breakfast, and they clearly knew they had the tunes we all wanted to hear: ugly thrashing power-violence mixed up in a scrum with Poison Idea and the X-Claim! discography. If the number of beer cans hurled at the performing band were counted as votes, Reek Minds easily won the evening, and they even upped the ante by introducing dirt and gravel as possible projectiles – the vocalist’s only real banter was a strained “give me… dirt!”, and he didn’t have to ask twice. Instead, he screamed so hard that the speakers would frequently overload and cut out, giving his voice the feel of a garbled trumpet – Gutalax, eat your heart out! While the portable PA and outdoor acoustics make for a less-than-desirable sound, Reek Minds sounded surprisingly full as the air turned chilly; even the drummer’s snare, somewhat lost in the wind for Yambag, cut through nice and sharp. When the apocalypse inevitably arrives, I want these guys on my side – after their music blows the windows out of a Cybertruck, the five of them could lift it and toss it in the river.

While listed first on the flyer, Early Grave grabbed the headlining spot, a practical move to keep their local friends in check (and make sure the out-of-towners had their fun, in the case of a bust). For as ramshackle as the show was, they were the first band to suffer any real sort of technical difficulties – at first the faltering microphone, and later the bass amp after two rowdy showgoers piggypack-rode directly into it. Those were only slight hiccups for this great new Philly trio, who harnessed the slimy menace of Crazy Spirit and Dawn Of Humans with their grotesque interpretation of hardcore-punk. The vocalist barked his vocals from under a tight black hoodie (a poise and stature redolent of Poison Ruïn’s Mac Kennedy), and they kept pace with the touring acts nicely. For whatever reason, it took a few songs to warm up what was an already-warmed-up crowd, but once things were in full swing they truly swung, with the widest, dustiest pit actions going off and surprisingly few bodies hitting the floor (mercifully so, as the ground’s craggy cement chunks and sewage run-off could cut your skin and infect it in one fluid motion). They sounded great, though as I watched Jim Shomo (of Dark Thoughts and Delco MFs) absolutely raging along in stationary position (when he wasn’t actively helping to fix the mic or bass), I couldn’t help but think that hardcore bands usually have stand-alone lead vocalists for good time-tested reason. Had Shomo grabbed the mic and took over for a few songs, I would’ve had no choice but to crawl up the bridge’s graffiti-covered pier by my fingernails and backflip down into the shadows. Instead, we made a hasty exit on the smooth side of the Superfund landfill this time, microplastics and silica dust shining our way along the dirt path like magic treasure.