^{Physics photo by Piper Carr}

With all due respect, I have no idea what the fuck Charles Mudede is talking about when it comes to the Physics. What else is new, right? To my ears, they’re a fine, but not outstanding and hardly futurist hip hop act—solid beats and grooves; regular, easy cadences; and one song that abysmally rhymed “my way” with “information super-highway” before going on to name-check Myspace, Starbucks, Bill Gates, and Boeing (ugh). Not helping matters any is that when the group brought out some friends—Grynch, Gatsby, and Macklemore—for a posse cut (“this is how we chill / from ‘08 ‘til”), their guests handily stole the show (this is, I suppose, the danger of having guests). Grynch and Macklemore, neither of whom I’d seen before, were especially amped, rapping double time and working references to the Block Party into their rhymes. Macklemore had the best punchline of the day, too: [something about real hip hop] “the radio ain’t playing them / we need KUBE like we need another stadium.” See, now that’s how you geek out on Seattle, not with some Bill Gates shit. After that heated performance, it was pretty hard to get too invested in the Physics’ last song, the mellow single “Ready For We.”