Animal Crackers

Detail: Hip Hop culture, for many a Cincinnati youth, tastes like Animal Crackers. It's a crowd that now features local musicians of various styles returning for their nearly-eleventeenth Animal Crackers show (members of Admiral Walker, Lazy Rocket, Velvet Dreamfield, an ex-Rottweiler and a few from the aforementioned Mood).

The DJs proceed spinning both their own and crowd favorites, mixing them with their own supplementary swipes and pitch-shiftings. The break-dancers, the warm-up now over, intensify their street moves. One DJ selects the Mos Eisley cantina band from Star Wars as one of the host MCs checks his mic over the time-honored galactic swing.

Animal Crackers: an incubation dish for the Hip Hop culture of tomorrow. And for the young B-Boys, DJs and MCs here, tomorrow is tonight.

That's just it, young listener. This is a sonic box of defining movie lines, bass rhythms, various tempo shifts, atmospheric keyboards, sound effects, middle-school stage band drum solos, root canal guitars and television serial organs. All of this strikes without warning. Such acts are pressed as a way of giving back to Hip Hop. Aspiring DJs and MCs, as they construct their own tracks, can lift this beat here, that rhythm there, another sample elsewhere. If they do, here's hoping they do as Animal Crackers and other Hip Hop artists do, and plant something for every beat they dig.