By Karynn Brown
Photos by Stephanie Paul
Oct. 18, 2017
Snow Tha Product, born Claudia Feliciano in Texas, has a musical style that is often grouped with Tech N9ne, one of her former collaborators. She performs in Spanish and English, spitting hard and fast raps alongside steady house-style beats. Snow’s music and performance was a mix of hardcore rap, feminine self-love and a carefree party mindset.
Tuesday night brought Snow Tha Product and her #VibeHigher tour to the Bourbon Theater. After their first Nebraska performance, the tour continues through the midwest and into the south, including Iowa, North Carolina and Arizona, finally ending in Seattle the second week in December. This tour celebrates Snow Tha Product’s first album, entitled Half Way There Pt. 1 which was released June 3 on the label Atlantic.
The Vibe Higher crew includes Snow herself, as well as her family members that perform, dance, and help manage the tour, AJ Hernz and Castro Escobar, both of whom produce their own original music.
The Mexican-American hip hop artist brought an evening of energy and pure unpredictability to the night.
The show kicked off at 8 p.m., leading to two and a half hours of performances by local hip hop artists and members of Snow’s tour crew, all before she came on stage around 10:45 p.m.
Snow arrived to a steady chant of her name and started the show by taking a shot with her three crew members, and her 2014 single, “Hola.”
Snow ended her first song with a shout to the crowd, “The only thing that’s going to sober me up now is tacos or bad bitches,” and left the stage momentarily.
She returned, downing bottles of water and asking the DJ to play a song and give her a minute before she was ready to sing again. Snow took another moment between songs to call to the crowd for women who could twerk, bringing them up on stage. Within minutes, 20-30 women filled the stage, dancing on Snow, her crew members, and one another. Those that lasted the hour and a half long performance remained onstage for the full set.
While she usually performs alone, Snow took the stage alongside Castro Escobar, AJ Hernz and an unnamed performer. Together, they kept the show rolling and the crowd full of energy. The on-stage relationship and energy between the three main performers was truly unique. They performed with the relaxed, no rules style of family members joking around together. Snow made her set list as the show progressed, asking the crowd, the DJ, and the men which songs should go next. She performed several longtime favorites, “Play”, “Drunk Love”, and “Nights.”
During “Waste of Time,” Snow stepped into the pit to direct the three men during their part of the song’s hook. “Let’s do this again and if these boys don’t get it right they’re off the tour!” Snow yelled to a cheering crowd, starting the song from the beginning.
The whole night rose and fell through the lawless, mixed-up energy of a house party turned band practice turned Tuesday night.
All of the performers of the evening were beyond impressed with the abundance of energy the crowd brought.
“I really underestimated you Nebraska,” Snow noted.
She told a the crowd about their encounter with harsh racism the night before at a roadside diner upon entering Nebraska. As a group of Latinx performers from mainly California and Texas, the Vibe Higher tour group was convinced they had no business in Nebraska, let alone Lincoln. Tuesday night’s crowd, ample drinks and erratic energy definitively changed the opinion of Nebraska in the minds of Snow and her crew.
Throughout the night Snow thanked the crowd for their energy.
“I expected some country shit… I never expected to have this much fun… I never expected Nebraska to be so lit,” Snow told the crowd multiple times.
Once she was fully prepared to perform, Snow was determined to keep the party-level energy going, constantly asking the sound booth for more volume and bass in her monitors. She was hoping to perform, “for way longer than they told me I could be on stage.”
At 11:30 p.m., the nearly packed house crowd began to thin, until a small but concentrated crowd remained on the floor. Snow ended the show with one of their favorite songs to perform, “Get Down Low”. She said goodbye to the crowd as the house lights went up, asking for late-night places to continue the after party, and promising the crowd free merchandise.
The openers of the night included a small but mighty showcase of local hip hop artists including Hakim, Tim Curtis-Beard and Chris “Phippa” Phipps.
Curtis-Beard performed his newest single, “Daylight”, which dropped on ITunes earlier Tuesday. The single is a precursor work to an upcoming album, “Common Courtesy,” which is set to release in December. He and Phippa performed several songs together.
“When I rap and he dances, or when he raps and I dance, that energy is like an atomic bomb, in a healthy way,” said Phipps.
Phipps and Curtis-Beard have a dynamic, mentor-mentee relationship rooted in Phipps’ love of inspiring others and Curtis-Beard’s strong network of Lincoln connections. A last-minute booking, Curtis-Beard happily accepted the opportunity to open for Snow and play with Phipps and Hakim.
Karynn Brown and Stephanie Paul are interns at KZUM.
