"North America's hottest new hip-hop group" had been taking the tourist trail round Longshan Temple earlier in the week and had wound up at a foot-massage parlor. The promoters needed some shots of the boyz from Offsides for a documentary and decided this was going to be it. They got the owner of the place to play their new DVD and settled in their seats for a rub.
The rest of the clientele were in the midst of deep relaxation and it wasn't until the beats and the rhymes kicked in that they sat up a bit.
His feet warming in water, Malicious -- the freestyle champion of Quebec -- started in with some rapping. Lowkey (who got his feet scraped by the massage guy and was getting pissed at people mistaking him for Michael Jordan) joined in. Bailey, who was the joker of the group, started chopping and waving his hands while rapping. DROne, the DJ, just kicked back and enjoyed getting his feet fondled. He was the ladies' man, that night.
By the time they had finished getting their legs massaged, Offside had made friends and converts. The owner of the place had got them to tag the wall and the girls had all been given autographed CDs.
The Vinyl Word had been asked to show the group around town and decided the temple, Snake Alley, some KTVs and old brothels nearby would provide good visuals for the video.
Offsides had arrived two days
earlier in a whirlwind of self-publicity for the release of its debut CD Foul Language, and to help celebrate Club TU's 15th anniversary by playing there for three nights starting yesterday.
According to Jonathan Wakrat, OdoubleF Records' director of operations in this country and the one who calls Offsides the hottest hip-hop group on the continent that invented it, the band gave up a 10,000-person show with Cypress Hill to be here today. The way he said it, it makes sense to fly in a band on a 35-hour flight from Montreal, Canada, to play TU -- "the oldest hip-hop club in Taiwan and hence at the center of Chinese rap" -- rather than play a big gig in front of thousands with one of the biggest names in the industry.
After the massage it was down the alley and past the macaw, the snakes being skinned, the trinket stores, the sex shops sporting mostly dildos and G-strings (and a realistic jack-in-the-box man who jumps out from the rear window ledge of a car when it's being stolen, supposedly), to the old brothels that mostly service retired Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) soldiers.
The boyz asked for drinks before we went down the dark and narrow lanes, so we stocked up at a 7-Eleven. Bailey seemed pretty happy about the idea of getting debauched. The others looked pretty tough, but I had the feeling they were nice guys and didn't want to do anything they would later regret.
Wakrat, as ever, was worried about the visuals and didn't know how to bring this off. No worries, Bailey got chatting, Lowkey and DROne got friendly, and soon we were piling into a small little dive and plunging downstairs. It was at this point, reality set in and everybody just wanted to get out. As we left, the madame was shouting prices, which went down from NT$1,500 to NT$500, to "take me free." She eventually got NT$800 from Wakrat just to keep quiet and let us leave.
There was a cockroach fight, various stops for Lowkey to tell people he was not a basketball player, more beer stops,
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