Yonas

The thing I love about the New York based hip hop artist Yonas, is his endeavour to, as he so eloquently put it, to ‘bring content back to popular music’. He’s well known for his topical lyrics, and seeing him perform live is a great way to experience their full intention and capacity, and it’s refreshing to hear and artist try and transfer this into popular culture.
Yonas san on stage to a huge applause, and gave a great introduction, thanking everyone for listening to his message and music, and he launched straight into The Transition. He played it with the music video on in the background behind him which was a cool touch, and everyone was singing along from the very start. The atmosphere was great, and Yonas encouraged it by holding out his microphone, and getting everyone to sing and dance along.
He performed the majority of his tracks with his DJ, who nailed every song, reading Yonas really well and extending the tracks when he was improvising. Towards the end of the set, he told us in the audience that he was working on a new track, but didn’t have any music for it yet. He went on to perform in a slam poetry style, some really poignant lyrics that had everyone going crazy. At live shows it’s rare for something like that to happen, but when it does, it’s incredibly special, and I think he was really grateful for the way we all showed our appreciation.