Saturday, April 11 saw Mighty Mark and TT the Artist coming to Gardner. Mighty Mark is a DJ hailing from Baltimore, a spot renowned for the dance genre its innovative and forward-thinking musicians have created, known as Bmore club or bounce. The genre is known for its extremely quick beat framework, sounding like a helter-skelter mix of staccato house club music. The genre has been influential across club and electronic music, and this concert brought two of its most formidable artists on the contemporary scene to our Jewel of the Prairie.
Like any good club music, the tracks that Mighty Mark spun focused on sex and turning up. Let’s be real, there’s nothing that makes people get down on the dance floor like tracks telling you to do precisely that. That’s the kind of wares that Mighty Mark deals in, like in tracks labeled “Ping Pong.” Featured on the track is TT the Artist, who would come out later that night to shut it down.
“Girl a Real Freak / She make the booty jiggle / She horny for the ding dong / Her booty bounce like ping pong.”
Alright, so the lyrics weren’t something English majors would slave over to scan and analyze (or would they?), but they do what any good dance track should do: make people lose it. DJ Mighty Mark brought the stuff of legends. When the track dropped into overtime, TT’s soft whisper of “big booty” combined with the fanfare of the beat had students tripping over themselves (literally, since some tried to do footwork) to keep up with the music.
“I had been practicing my butt shaking in the mirror all week for this conference. I wasn’t gonna show anyone until I was ready, and I’m ready now,” said Linnea Hurst ’15.
But not everyone was as ready as Hurst. On the Gardner dance floor, one could see that audible pause that students took to take in all of the auditory stimuli. This wasn’t the kind of music one hears typically, it’s the kind of bombastic bass that you hear in the club, the legit club.
When TT the Artist came on, the anticipation from the students was palpable. TT’s discography brings you variety, the kind that makes one think a separate artist did each track on the record. She gives you Angel Haze meets Katie got Bandz emcee on “Thug it Out,” which riled the audience. When she spit the chorus the first time, the sing-along with the crowd happened nearly simultaneously. If you didn’t know, now you know: Grinnell students can definitely thug it out. In the front, to TT’s delight, girls were yelling into each other’s faces.
“Bandana on, yeah I’m bout to thug it out / if a hater talking shit go ahead and stomp ’em out / if you got a problem we can settle it tonight / meet me outside, you ain’t ’bout that life!”
TT wasn’t going to let us forget that she was there to make us dance. She consistently entered the dance flow to entice students to join her, and she actually invited “beautiful girls and booty shakers” onto the stage to act as her interim hype-girls. Next thing you know, the stage was bumping with booty shakers and droppin’-it-low-ers.
The standout moment of the night was when TT began her one of her most heavily circulated tracks: “Pussy Ate.”
“Don’t want no car, don’t want no cash / Don’t want no date, I just want my pussy ate!”
Judging by the uproar of dancing that TT summoned with this song, I would say Grinnellians’ vibes have adopted this modern day diva-hustler philosophy with gusto. Friday night saw all types of homies letting loose and enjoying themselves with abandon in a decidedly woman-centric dance bacchanal. The music continued late into the night, and TT and Mighty Mark jammed with the students until the later came on. Just like a real club, y’all! Shout out to SGA [Concerts].
