Ludacris is clever, damn clever!

What were you doing on Thursday from 8 to 12 pm? If you had $32.00 and like hip-hop, you should have been enjoying Ludacris at the Pageant.

Upon arrival, we walked up to the balcony where the hometown crowd was already going nuts for Chingy. Having never before heard Chingy, I was blown away by the show he put on. Of course, it could have been the margaritas and Jagermeister that I pounded beforehand, but listening to his raucous yet refined performance made me want to tear some shit up. In fact, the entire balcony was tearing the place up. With the exception of a Phish show, I have never seen so much audience enthusiasm.

Chingy ripped through such treats as "He's Herre," "Gettin It" and "Represent," along the way whipping the crowd into a frenzy with allusions to St. Louis. At one point, in a thinly veiled expression of disdain for our beloved/reviled President, one of Chingy's associates invited audience members to "raise your middle finger to George Bush." Looking down on the floor from above, it appeared as though they liberally obliged. I wasn't quite sure what the stated motivations for the protest were (really bad echo in the Pageant), but it's always fun to mix music, politics, and alcohol.

Particular commendations are due to the evening's spotlight operator, who was faced with the daunting task of shining his luminous circle upon the rapper, through a contingent of drugged up fans dancing in the front of the balcony. Concluding his set with "Right Thurr," Chingy left, leaving everyone in a state of frantic anticipation for Ludacris. The crowd was like a nuclear bomb waiting to explode. As he emerged, one woman got so energetic that she began wildly flailing her arms with apparent disregard to those around her. But rather than cry about how her elbow spilled my cosmopolitan all over me, I exulted in her charisma.

There is no comparison between driving around and screaming out the words to "Roll Out" in the car with your friends, and then actually seeing Atlanta's greatest treasure in the flesh. You can't just sit there and listen to his music; it demands a response. Ludacris always seemed to have the crowd in the palm of his hand. His ear-shattering renditions of such masterpieces as "Southern Hospitality," "Move," "Act a Fool" and "Stand Up" delighted my suburban sensibilities with lyrics such as "Mouth full of platinum/ Mouth full of gold/ Forty glock cal keep your mouth on hold" as well as "You think twelve gon catch me, Gimmie a break, I'm super-charged with the hide-away license plate/ It seems they wanna fingerprint me and gimmie some years/ They'll only get one finger while I'm shifting gears."

At one point we were approached by a woman who insisted that we had been smoking "some good shit" and wanted in. After repeatedly informing her that we were not actually the ones with alleged "good shit," she went on in continuation of her quest.

Halfway through the show Ludacris brought out rapper Shawnna, a friendly new face with the DTP (Disturbing tha Peace) crew. She really helped Cris spice things up with an uncensored version of "What's Your Fantasy," in what was probably the evening's biggest climax. For those of you who have ever been annoyed by listening to the radio version of "Southern Hospitality" where a third of the song is absent, you can appreciate the artistic freedom possible when working outside the confines of the archaic, puritanical FCC.

Ludacris really worked the crowd. Once he polled the female members of the audience as to their intentions regarding the night's activities. After asking a rather pointed question, he used the favorable response as a clever segue into the now-ubiquitous "Splash Waterfalls," in which Ludacris attributes his mischievous ways to the machinations of Cupid. Cris began to wind things down with my personal favorite "Growing Pains," probably the only hip-hop song that could bring tears to my eyes. This was also probably the only time that the crowd wasn't going full throttle. It was a nice respite from an otherwise entirely insane evening.

What you realize when you listen to a lot of his music, is that Ludacris is clever. Damn clever. It's the understated way that he presents information. If you don't know the words, you can't get a tenth of what's going on. Of course, there are songs where he is very heavy-handed in describing something, but in general he thrives on what I might almost term a subtlety. While he relies on often used themes in rap music, he has an ear for figurative language and a quick sharp verbal jab that I am sure would make him a great poet or political columnist.

I was sad when the show ended, very sad. But I was excited as well by the prospect of seeing Guster the very next night in the very same venue. Somehow in the process of emerging back on Delmar and going home I acquired a poster of a scantily-clad Shawnna heralding her new album "Worth tha Weight." But I did not buy it; someone handed it to me. I would not buy something like that, I swear.

At any rate, I adorned the poster with a fictitious autographed inscription written to myself, and it now adorns the wall, a humorous reminder of a wonderful evening.