In May, I was driving to Des Moines with my friend Malina. We were going to see Open Mike Eagle and Future Islands. In the background–and honestly the foreground as I anxiously rambled–everything was falling down. I was cut from my radio job I loved, even after I did everything to the best it could’ve been done. It felt like a part of me was rejected.
Just as everything ends, everything begins, everything leaves, everything stays. That change is always felt, whether it takes weeks or hours to manifest. It aches in your limbs when the bones begin to stretch, or in the sudden shock when you turn the corner to a vacant lot that was full and familiar the last time you stepped foot there.
It’s a theme that gnaws at both artists. Since 2016’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, Open Mike Eagle has primarily ruminated on the past: how old homes have been turned to rubble, how decades long relationships have shattered, and how all the once new and magical components eventually are coated in dust. On his Morning Show, which he livestreams on Twitch, he talks with his audience about old rap groups coming and going, or his own personal experiences as a different contextual perspective to whatever hip hop debate is happening that week.
Open Mike Eagle is an artist that has tinged about a quarter of my life. I remember listening to him right before I fucked up my ACT driving to school on a dreary day, in the shadow of a looming pandemic. The second article I ever published was a weakly-written review of his 2022 album Component System with the Auto Reverse. His very playful style and sound that still carries a lot of the nostalgic hipster tendencies from his early work has always felt comforting. Malina said that listening to Open Mike and his collaborators like Sammus was very eye-opening to her, having grown up in a fully suburban town in the middle of Iowa. His voice has been there for the entirety of our adulthood.
We met Malina’s friend Jorden near the venue at the large sculpture park where signs exclaiming “do not touch” obscured all the pieces. We lay on the grass as we waited for the show to start, bathing in the moment. When we walked up to the venue, it was a little jarring. It was at Hoyt Sherman Place, which looked like a country club that sat atop a pristine lawn that rolled down a hill. Inside the regal theatre were ornamental decorations creeping up the wall and across the dome above, half-tuxedoed ushers, and classical paintings in the halls. It was far off from taped-together DIY venues where I first saw videos of Future Islands. Open Mike Eagle described it as “Not your usual place to have a rap show.”
During his set, Eagle stood at the front of the stage, looking down at the people sitting in rows in front of him. The songs in the set ranged from across his discography. He played his beats from a laptop and sample pad that sat in front of him on a tower of audio equipment while he rapped over them. Initially, it felt like a major divide, an established hierarchy that didn’t feel fitting for him. Throughout his quick set though, Open Mike broke down that separation, talking with the crowd and telling anecdotes about his walk downtown earlier in the day, like how he found a fish dried up on a bridge, seemingly using its entire might to strand itself. His approachability and openness lowered the stage to the audience’s level. He didn’t feel like limited god, but just another person on everyone else’s level, exchanging stories on a face-to-face level.
