At House of Blues, the Essence of Hip-Hop

Friday’s show at the House of Blues should have been videotaped and distributed to classes as a visual textbook called “Hip-Hop History 101.”

DJ Shadow, through his Afrika Bambaataa-influenced selection of eclectic music, took the crowd back to the days when a deejay could play a rock record, a funk record and an opera record back to back. Jeru the Damaja demonstrated the concept of the MC as the hard rhymer, the party rocker the self-created superhero. And headliners De La Soul showed the astounding level hip-hop rises to when eclectic beats and hard rhymes are combined.

What the sold-out crowd witnessed was the first hip-hop show in a long time that got back to the music’s essence--not only in the sense that the three acts proved that the idea of rocking the crowd, having fun and throwing stress to the wind at a hip-hop jam hasn’t been played out, but also in the way they broke down the evolution of the music.

DJ Shadow is a 24-year-old white man from Davis, but he understands the power of the drum and the mysticism of rhythm. This 24-year-old samurai of the digital sampler demonstrates things about African rhythms through his conceptual beat collages that LeRoi Jones explained 30 years ago in his seminal book about African American music, “Blues People.”

Shadow, who introduces himself on his critically acclaimed debut album “Endtroducing . . . “ as a student of the drum, practiced Jones’ thesis that in the African concept, rhythm is less a tempo marker than a full-fledged language. Shadow, like all scholars and fans who fully understand the pure essence of black music, comprehends that drum beats themselves contain words, speeches, epic stories and melodies all their own. Sometimes lyrics and showy performances get in the way of that.

In his opening set his beats started as a murmur and culminated in a crescendo, running through an eclectic selection of underground West Coast rap, Miami bass-style electro-beats and weird records that resembled techno but still had a firm hip-hop grounding. Shadow seemed less concerned with getting the crowd dancing than with getting them to listen to the variety.

But if the evening belonged to anyone, it was De La Soul (who also played Saturday night at the Galaxy in Santa Ana). The Long Island natives, who have created four of the most cutting-edge hip-hop albums ever, had the whole crowd in a frenzy. The trio freestyled and shouted their playful rhymes with equal parts bravado and humor. Like Shadow and Jeru, they proved that the secret to hip-hop longevity comes not from following trends but setting them.