He shall overcome

Published May 19, 2009 at 6:55 p.m.
...Amadeus the Stampede keeps on pushing...
There’s nothing lamer than articles that lead with cheap metaphors inspired by an artist’s stage name. But I can’t avoid this one: when Amadeus the Stampede rushes, get the fuck out of the way.

BARD KNOCKS: “I couldn’t catch a break,” says Amadeus. “Always had to fight my way out of the gutter with the attitude that I will cut you off at the knees if you get in my way.”

There’s nothing lamer than articles that lead with cheap metaphors inspired by an artist’s stage name (i.e., Britney Spears is like a dagger to the heart!; The Police are arresting!). But I can’t avoid this one: when Amadeus the Stampede rushes, get the fuck out of the way.

From his days in the Metco program — which, in Fresh Air Fund fashion, buses inner-city students to schools in glistening suburbs — to his summers on Cape Cod and multiple psychiatric-ward stints, Amadeus (who comes to the Middle East next Thursday) has been surrounded by degeneracy. “Even when I went down to North Carolina — when my brother was dying from AIDS — I lived on the roughest street in my city,” says Stampede, hardly a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air type of transplant. “I couldn’t catch a break — always had to fight my way out of the gutter with the attitude that I will cut you off at the knees if you get in my way.”

I meet up with Amadeus at Sonsie on Newbury — a place, as it turns out, that he frequented after signing his first deal, in 2002. The situation yielded little more than a little-heard debut, but he earned enough from the rich white-boy investors for an occasional chic dining experience — even if his rhymes were contractually bound to their defunct imprint, Rapture, until this year. He couldn’t legally drop a proper release under his new management (Boston rap promotion juggernaut Leedz Edutainment), yet beginning in 2005 Amadeus cranked out four mixtapes in as many years.

The first, his Mindfuck Mixtape, was crudely engineered but vital as ever — a project he threw together in just 10 hours. His efforts got more polished with a Born Losers disc alongside his accomplice Skinny Cavallo — a South Shore native whom Amadeus starting rapping with in high school — and last year’s Ultimate High, which foreshadowed his slide away from traditional Golden Era flavor and into contemporary oceans. Although he still waved his confident leather gruff across 16-bar verses on every track, Amadeus spit atop an adventurous and eclectic mash of synthetic meat and boom-bap potatoes.

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