Saturday night was the L.A. release party for JanSport’s new lines of backpacks and bags. In an effort to make the company hip again and make backpacks that don’t have to have a litany of pins and patches to look interesting, JanSport is releasing a line of “heritage bags” and a series of backpacks designed by two renowned street artists, Julie West and JoeX2. The artists have turned backpacks into canvasses for their art. The backpacks, some of which I really like the design of, are now available from JanSport.
Since the show was a promotion for a line of backpacks and bags, tickets were free and the show was open to all ages. I hadn’t been to an all-ages show in quite some time, and it’s a vibe I don’t especially miss. Despite the free admission and all-ages status of the show, it was sparsely attended, which was certainly disappointing for JanSport, but partly their own fault.
After several performances that were good but did not inspire me to write - by Black Spade, U-N-I, Shawn Jackson, Amp Live, and Blu Jemz, we got to Raashan Ahmad, who was definitely the star of the night. He is best known in his role as MC for the Crown City Rockers, an Oakland hip hop band that has achieved modest success.
Ahmad’s set, performed solo with no backing band or visible DJ, set the crowd moving. People had been milling around restlessly, but Ahmad got everyone on the dance floor. Ahmad showed that he has the talent and the charisma to possibly take his career to far greater heights, despite the fact that his show seemed under-produced and rushed together by the organizers. Much of the crowd left after Ahmad’s appearance, the second to last of the night.
Headliners The Rebirth finished off the show. I was impressed at the outset by the band’s sound, a mix of ’70s soul and funk with hip hop, but the shine started to wear off after a couple of songs, when I realized that everything the band performed sounded extremely similar. The band has a sound that is uncommon these days and just needs to get a little bit more creative to go from merely okay to really good.
I think that JanSport did a relatively poor job of promoting its new products. The promotion consisted primarily of projecting pictures of the new backpacks and JanSport logo on a wall in the back of the venue where people were unlikely to spend much time looking and having a sign designed by JoeX2 on stage that had no connection to backpacks whatsoever. The event seemed to have been designed for consumption primarily on video afterward, which had to have been disappointing for anyone there to see backpacks over music, since there were no backpacks on display. The venue did not fit well with some of the performances - The Roxy is a major venue not normally home to underground hip hop performances, which showed among the employees, some of whom did not seem excited by the prospect of working an all ages show of music they were not interested in.
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