March 24th, 2009
Asher Roth, Doin’ Morrisville Proud
Having grown up in fairly close proximity to Morrisville, PA, up there in Lower Bucks County, it seems to me that nothing much good, bad, or otherwise has happened in or come out of Morrisville (except for super-duper journalist/publicist Howard Wuelfing, but that’s a bit “inside baseball,” sorry…). Until now, anyway, with the lightning-fast rise of 21-year-old Morrisville rapper Asher Roth, whose flow comes off like the unholy spawn of Eminem and G. Love, and who probably coulda won that White Rapper VH-1 reality show from a couple of years ago. MTV picked Roth’s SXSW performance last week — which Brian McManus wrote about the other day — as one of the Top 10 moments from the entire festival:
His set was very short and happened very late at night, but it proved that 21-year-old rapper Asher Roth might actually be the breakout star of 2009. Laconic and bed-headed, Roth might try to play down his deft lyrical touch and ability to spin a narrative, but on songs like “Lark on My Go-Kart” and “Blunt Cruising,” he does just that (and work in a MILF joke or two). And it translates to the stage. The crowd at the Deville ate him up, and by the time he got around to his hit, the dorm-room banger “I Love College,” the place was going bananas. He sounds like Eminem, looks like your R.A. and has a fascination with weed that is perhaps rivaled only by the immortal B-Real. Now that’s elite company.
You can judge for yourself if Roth is worth all the hype via a couple of upcoming local shows: He’s at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ on April 23rd (where he’ll no doubt celebrate the 393rd anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare — it’s a college, and he loves college, after all), and on the second stage during the Roots Picnic on June 6th at Festival Pier at Penn’s Landing.
I wish David Lee Roth was Asher Roth’s dad. That would be 393 kinds of awesome…
