DIY-Day 3: "Been a Minute"

If you're up on the big stage under the big lights and the sun's gone down... best do something up-to or at-least-near the level of: ... belting out Madonna ballads in your underwear. Illy Mack showed this town a party last night during the D.I.Y. Street sensations... Two brass players, a full rock-suited band firing along and then five, wait, seven? eight?--back-up singers; plus the usual duo and their riled-up/charmingly-raunchy banter and antics. Jeez, they even made Billy Ocean seem infectious...

But as we head into night-three, the question becomes, how do we top that? How do we close out year 5 of this Ferndalian festival of grassroots art autonomy, the biggest one we've yet seen (bolstered onto two blocks, flanked by a taco truck and a barbecue broiler and shadowed at both ends by the Metro Times main stage and a Ferris Wheel).

It's up to these guys...

Dynamic post-funk rap-duo Passalacqua (seen left, with producer/DJ Erno the Inferno) are premiering a new music video tonight (9:15 p.m. on the Metro Times stage).

"Been A Minute..." (stream below)...

...is essentially their theme song, their seminal jam. Flared with shimmering soulful guitars and brass blares, shuffled with furious scratches underneath and smoothly shuffled along with steady stepping beat, it set the tone for many of their songs to come - a celebratory vibe seemingly universally applicable to the sunset-glittered backyard barbecue or to the just-past-midnight/third-keg-tapped carpet-ruining house-party, the soundtrack of something that could get out of hand at any moment but keeps things in line; that steady beat, that soulful hook, that musing give-and-take from one lyricist to another.

"Been A Minute's" raps-out their origin story, condensed to an 8-bar summation -with Mister reflecting upon the ten-years he spent sans-contact with his once Jr. High School friend, Blaksmith, and how they realigned in the early spring of 2010 and began swapping some raps. The rest, I guess, as it goes, is history: "Every road has a bit of a wind  / Each one with a specific design

Many a difference between yours and mine / And yet, we ended up following the same signs / Now whenever times get tough, we bust out with the rhymes..."

Anyhow... This will prove to be one of, if not the last incarnation of Passalacqua's heretofore year-long live presentation, as they're completely destroying/rebuilding their stage delivery in the next month: "...the last hurrah of the last hurrah," so sayeth Mister.

Expect, at the very least: a music video debut (directed by Andy Miller) and at least 12-canon's worth of confetti. Though, rumor has it, there's much more in store...