Somerville's Art Beat is getting underway about a block from the orphanage, at Seven Hills Park.  Although I am somewhat misanthropic, I'm not, strictly speaking, agoraphobic.  I don't mind crowds as long as they're moving, preferably not all in the same direction (away from me, and parades are exceptions, however). 

It's when you've got a lot of people just standing around that they become something more than just a crowd.  At best they're a gathering of bodies waiting to be plowed into at top speed by an elderly person in a Cadillac who momentarily thought the accelerator was the brake. 

My advice: keep moving if you don't want to be a statistic.

I can't say I was dying to hang out at Art Beat, but the drum and bass called to me from the front porch as I sat sipping my Friday evening cocktail with Batman, one of the neighborhood superfriends, waiting for the call.  I was also in the market for a little something to nibble on, and thought, why not?  So I toodled on over.

The first music act of the night went on at 6:30.  It was an all-white hip-hop band called Diatribe and Q Public, and I arrived to hear them chanting to the crowd of mostly early thirty-something parents with toddlers:

This is your song, fuckin' morons!
Yo yo yo!
This is your song, fuckin' morons!

That was, more or less, the chorus.  There was an intriguing slant-rhyme involving balls in there, too.  "Lick my balls, fuckin morons." Something of that nature.  Very family friendly fare for the early evening crowd. 
 
I'm not a huge fan of hip-hop, myself. Unless it's got L.L. Cool J. soaking naked in a giant glass of bubbly I can probably do without it.  I think most of it's just what we used to call "acting out".  It's belligerent braggadocio with a beat. 

I guess it's the beat that makes it aht.  And maybe the slant rhymes.