Music

PHOTOS: Boston celebrates hip-hop’s 50th birthday

Local hip-hop group STL GLD and the City of Boston put on a festival in honor of the genre’s 50th anniversary.

City Hall Plaza filled with festival-goers Saturday for GLD FSTVL, a celebration of fifty years of hip-hop. Vincent Alban for the Boston Globe

By Chloe Courtney Bohl

August 14, 2023

2 minutes to read

City Hall Plaza filled with hip-hop lovers on Saturday for a free, public festival celebrating the genre’s 50th birthday.

Organized by Boston-based hip-hop group STL GLD and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, GLD FSTVL (pronounced “gold festival”) was headlined by nationally-touring acts EarthGang and Dead Prez. But the rest of the performers were local: STL GLD was joined on the mainstage by Oompa (from Roxbury), Van Buren Records (Brockton), Latrell James, Billy Dean Thomas, kei (all from Boston), and the Cambridge Community Center’s youth program The Hip Hop Transformation.

Four local DJs — DJ E DUBBLE, DJ WhySham, DJ Slipwax, and DJ Bobby Bangers — also performed.

The newly-renovated City Hall Plaza was the backdrop for GLD FSTVL, which the organizers hope will become an annual event. Around the plaza, festival-goers danced, lined up for food truck fares, and shopped for art and jewelry from local vendors, the Boston Globe reported. It was the first-annual hip-hop festival in Boston, and hopefully not the last, organizers said.

During their sets, performers shouted out Boston — “the city that we run — and can hardly afford to live in!” as the rapper Oompa proclaimed it during her set. “Thank you for showing people what can be done,” Moe Pope of STL GLD told the crowd during his group’s set.

Here’s what the festival looked like.