It’s Saturday night and Boldy James is two songs into his set at the Shelter, his first show since a brutal car wreck in January left him with a broken vertebrae in his neck and serious orthopedic damage.
“Feels good to be back man, I swear to God,” he says to a roar of cheers from a crowd. Tonight, there are no unenthusiastic fans in the house. Everyone is happy to see Boldy on the other side of his recent suffering and absorbed by the craft he so clearly lives for.
And it turns out that the concert format is a great venue for Boldy’s gifts to come to life. Because his production choices are just as minimalist as they are menacing, Boldy’s unusual talents as a rich, fluorescent storyteller are able to shine without having to worry about being swallowed by a thick wall of sound.
When he performs “Brick Van Exel,” off his 2020 project The Versace Tape, rows of fans rap along while screwing their faces up in disbelief, as if they may actually be hearing it, truly hearing it, for the first time:
“Servin’ all these pain pills, they look at me as a medic
Risk-takin’ for this relish…Cook a key then I swell it
Used to walk the dog, take it off the leash, then I pet it.”
Those familiar with the world he’s describing, or curious enough to find out, will know what he means here. One of Boldy’s greatest strengths as a storyteller is how he holds out an experience in the palm of his hands for you, turning it around slowly so that you can see it from every angle without him ever insulting your intelligence by over-explaining what’s there.
He makes his way to “Designer Drugs” from 2022’s Fair Exchange No Robbery, a track that opens with grief and paranoia walking hand in hand.
“Big city, small China, started as small-timers
“Scared to dwell on my past, I got Alzheimers
Totin’ my .30, me and girlie pullin’ all-nighters.”
Throughout the show, Boldy takes time to thank those who never left his side and kept the hope of his full recovery alive when doing so himself perhaps felt like flying too close to the sun. MC Serch is here, and Math Hoffa. Jalen Rose briefly takes center stage with him. And then there’s his son, who never leaves it. A budding talent in his own right who seems to be having a ball imitating his old man, he plays the part of both a ride-or-die hype man and potential heir all at once.
In recent years, Boldy has solidified himself as one of hip-hop’s elite world-builders, beloved not only for his ability to tell vivid stories while rapping his ass off, but for how those stories immerse listeners in a world that feels real and three-dimensional. Boldy is a true neighborhood griot, walking every inch of the concrete with you, turning down side streets and alleys, narrating what life on the edge of several simultaneous cliffs can do to a person.
All of this helps explain why Boldy’s return show is a massive success. If he had sat in a chair in the middle of the stage, holding court like an old bluesman, I’m not sure anyone would have noticed. Or, at least, it would have felt fitting. So many of Boldy’s songs feel like stepping through a portal, or being dropped into a world as lush and richly complex as any ecosystem on the planet. Every block of concrete contains an entire universe if you look and listen closely enough.
The show is just the first of a six-city stretch called the “Back Outside” tour, with the Detroit heavyweight teaming up with New Jersey spitter Chase Fetti. Soon after is the “Six Million Dollar Man” European run with acclaimed producer and frequent collaborator, the Alchemist.
After the tour was rescheduled following Boldy’s accident, it was reengineered around the story of his grueling path to recovery. Like the main character from the 1970s science fiction series, Alchemist described the process of reconstructing Boldy in a recent post: “we went into a laboratory” and “rebuilt him into a bionic man, complete with robotic enhancements that made him quicker and stronger than ever.”
Which reminds me of a moment around the middle of his set. Boldy is picking up steam and the audience is fully locked in, ready for the long haul. He turns to address them with his legendary nonchalance: “Let me see if I got it, gang.” It doesn’t matter that we’re now way past the point where anyone here doubts that he does.
He spends the second half of his set tearing through favorites like “How You Playin It” featuring Mafia Double Dee and “Scrape the Bowl,” and then winding through the expansive worlds of “Diamond Dallas,” “Steel Wool,” and “First 48.”
Through it all, he’s as good as anyone could hope for, and yet Boldy’s compass is still fixed to a point far off in the distance. There’s something special about watching an artist in the middle of a great performance wondering aloud if they have another gear left, hitting it, and then exercising enough self-control to rein it in.
Boldy refuses to claim too much too soon, and taunts that something greater is still to come. “I’m almost back, baby,” he says.
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