It's All Frosting From Hoodie Allen

Hoodie Allen w/ Luke Christopher and Myles Parrish
Showbox, Seattle, WA
10.26.17

After huge collabs with the likes of Blackbear, Kyle, and even Ed Sheeran, it seemed like Hoodie Allen’s show at The Showbox would sell out pretty quickly. However, walking in about ten minutes before the show was set to start, that seemed far from the case. At the start of the night, the floor was only about half full, but I guess that’s what happens when a show geared towards a school-aged crowd is set on a school night. A few stragglers filled in, and the lack of people absolutely didn’t equate a lack of energy—everyone was happy to turn up all night.

To open the night, Myles Parrish kicked things off with a performance eagerly followed by every googly-eyed girl in the front rows. Over too soon, his set quickly faded into Luke Christopher’s. What his set lacked in originality, it more than made up for in quality. Instead of putting together a whole set of original beats and rhymes, which as an opener, most people probably won’t be familiar with or listen to later, Christopher instead decided to take samples from popular EDM songs (lots of Flume, stuff like that), and rap over those. It meant the crowd was at least familiar with one aspect of the song, and was therefore happy to bounce along.

After the success of Happy Camper, Hoodie Allen’s last album, The Hype was set up to be just that—hyped. With sassy, unapologetic lyrics and catchy melodies, his set was built to thrive in a live setting. Opening with “Believe” and “Sushi” from his latest release, the night was off to a great start with new fans and old passionately singing and rapping along with the performer.

Throwing it back for the dedicated fans, “Cake Boy” came mid-set to switch things up a bit. Released on an album four years ago, the track’s sound is vastly different from his newer tracks. With an extremely simplistic backing, the song doesn’t have much more to it than the girls he’s rapping about, a stark comparison to the newer, more well-rounded ones. Applauding those who knew every word, Hoodie ended the track by throwing not one, but two cakes into the crowd, leaving frosting-smeared faces smiling the rest of the night.

The lyrics aren’t necessarily the kind of stuff you want to blast in suburban neighborhoods or with your parents in the car, but Steven Markowitz’s (Hoodie’s) personality is quite the opposite. On stage, he gets down with the songs and hypes them up singing about booze and sex, but between tracks is an extremely genuine, funny, and caring guy—a contrast that’s definitely fun to watch.

Two songs later, we were in the home stretch of the night, the banter between Hoodie and his band proving the price of admission worth it. Comparing the start of the set to hard classes at school, from this point on it was basically gym class—the easy A. Banger after banger, the crowd jumped up with the popular songs and laughed as he sang Ed Sheeran’s part in “All About it.”

Closing his encore with “No Interruption,” a song that has remained his most popular since its release in 2012, the crowd happily yelled along and cheered well after the stage had been cleared.

Review and photos by Lulu Dawson

Hoodie Allen