antipopper

   

My brother and I were hanging outside the TINA festival club on Sunday night, catching some air, when Maya Jupiter happened to pull up in her car. Yay! Snaps for Maya’s unexpected arrival!*

Maya seems to radiate beams wherever she goes. Her album seems to be doing well — it’s getting airplay, at least. My only problem with it is that she should have gotten me to design the cover. Fuck, I even could have come in as a Branding Consultant, and charged an Exorbitant Fee for one suggestion: turning the cover around. (A variation on the extremely considered, “turn it upside down” school of Star Trek design methodology.) As you can see, the inside of the sleeve, reproduced above on the right, totally out-spunks the actual cover. One flip would have done the trick. (In fact, I think she’s actually been flipping it herself when distributing the album personally.)

Maya was the last act that night, and completely levelled the place. In many ways her performance was gleefully incongruous; in the midst of all these angsty hipsters, Maya was an unabashedly Shiny Tidal Wave of Joy. She is, above all else, an Entertainer in the classic mould, and while I think she probably needs to distill her performance into a more iconic vehicle, she’s definitely onto a good thing. In particular, the garagey single “Move” goes off live — everyone in the room was jumping up and down. Afterwards, all the other MCs of the night stormed the stage to have a cypher, apparently to extend and share the vibe. But all I could see was a bunch of shouty boys who refused to accept that they’d been so completely upstaged by one woman.

*(Am I alone in thinking that the Snaps Cup was the only good thing about the unexpectedly appalling Legally Blonde 2? The one thing that kept me from walking out was the spectre of the whole US Congress snapping their fingers in approval, just like an anticapitalist spokescouncil. Too weird.)