Protoje – Criminal

So my man Protoje just announced the first leg of his tour promoting the upcoming, and greatly anticipated Ancient Future album.  The tour will be starting on the west coast in February with dates in Oakland, San Diego and Las Vegas (and some stops in between):

Now when I shared the above poster on my Facebook page, I added some hashtags for fun.  I didn’t really understand what hashtags meant on Facebook until a few months ago when my sister-in-law told me that when you click on them, you can see other posts that use the same hashtag.  One of the hastags I created was #ancientfuture and when I clicked it, I made an absolutely AWESOME discovery!  To date, Protoje has released two songs from the upcoming album.  The summer anthem “Who Knows” was released in the first half of 2014, and a track called “Stylin'” was released in late 2014.  Well, it turns out that after his concert in Miami (which I went to), he performed an as yet UNRELEASED track called “Criminal” during his subsequent European tour.  As luck would have it, there are a few decent bootlegs on YouTube.  The first one is from a concert in Germany.  If this was taken with a phone camera, they did an amazing job as the video is very still, and audio quality is pretty good.  Protoje starts off the video saying “No YouTube! No YouTube!”, although he seems to have a bit of smile on his face while saying it.  Within about 30 seconds, I was already in love with the track, and if this doesn’t get you singing and dancing by the end of it, you should check to see if you still have a pulse.

There is another bootleg from the Netherlands, which is slightly lower quality.  I think it’s still a good performance though, especially because he explains the significance of his lyrics in this one regarding the date of September 11th, 1987 (the date Peter Tosh was murdered).

I found a third bootleg from Paris, and while this video is vastly inferior to the others in terms of both video and sound quality, I wanted to include it to show everyone how many people were at this concert.  The crowd is absolutely MASSIVE, and it goes to show you how popular he is over in Europe.  I feel blessed that I was able to see him perform in a small club in Miami.  I’m really hoping he announces an east cost leg for his Ancient Future tour so I can start planning another trip 🙂