Riff Raff live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, February 2013

The billing put a record label in the headline. Riff Raff, it said, of Mad Decent, performing live at Crocks.

On 31 January 2013 the promoter Loffredo & Associates announced the date, and the title carried the label’s name as if it were a warranty. A Texas rapper sold on a Californian label’s name was booked into a February in a city on the north shore of Lake Superior.

That label belonged to the producer Diplo. He founded Mad Decent in Philadelphia in 2006, moved it to Los Angeles in 2010, and by the winter of 2013 it had a hit that went well beyond dance-music circles: Baauer’s Harlem Shake, which spread across YouTube through 2012 and into 2013.

The label’s catalogue leaned on trap, moombahton, hip-hop and dancehall, so a rapper on it shared a shelf with dance producers. For a club that ran a hip-hop night one week and a DJ night the next, that made the name easy to place.

The rapper behind the name

Riff Raff was born Horst Christian Simco and comes from Katy, Texas. Before the current name he appeared on the MTV series From G’s to Gents in 2009, and for a time he performed as MTV Riff Raff. By 2012 he had released the mixtape Birth of an Icon, and a collaboration with Dame Grease, Hologram Panda, came before his first studio album.

That album was slow to arrive, by any count. Neon Icon was first announced for September 2013 and postponed several times before it came out on 24 June 2014, on Mad Decent and 300 Entertainment. It entered the Billboard 200 at number 22, with Diplo as executive producer and guests including Childish Gambino, Mac Miller and Paul Wall.

The Crocks date therefore fell between the mixtapes and the album, at a point when the name was known well beyond any one record. Nothing from Neon Icon had been released yet.

What came in between

The first single from that album, How to Be the Man, appeared in November 2013. Tip Toe Wing in My Jawwdinz followed in June 2014. It was recorded in 2013, produced by Top Secret Productions, and reached number 24 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100. None of that existed when the Thunder Bay announcement went up.

Seen from January 2013, then, the booking was a bet on a name and not on a hit. That is a reading of the calendar and the discography, not a stated reason. It also fits the room’s habits that winter, when a hip-hop night could sit a few weeks from an electronic one and a few weeks from a Philadelphia rap duo.

Back on the calendar in 2017

Riff Raff was on the Crocks calendar again four years later. A Canadian tour reported by Exclaim in March 2017, under the title Aquaberry Aquarius, listed Thunder Bay on 24 April, one date on a run of eighteen cities that began on 13 April and ended on 6 May.

The club was still at 16 Cumberland Street South in April 2017, so the same room stood behind both dates, four years and a full album apart.

By then Neon Icon had been out for nearly three years and the label tag was no longer needed in the headline. The Aquaberry Aquarius tour was sold on the rapper’s own name, and it crossed the country from Nanaimo in British Columbia to Montreal. The 2013 billing belongs to a different point in a career, when the tag was part of the pitch.

The rest of that winter

The room had a full run of rap and dance dates around this one. Ill Bill and Vinnie Paz were announced first, on 10 January, and Dvbbs followed three days later for a date in March. Riff Raff was the third of the three announcements.

Diplo’s label began in Philadelphia, and Vinnie Paz of the January bill grew up there. That is only a coincidence, but it links two of those nights. The full list of dates at the club is on the shows page.