THE SKINNY BOYS, interview
Melody Maker, March 28 1987
by Simon Reynolds

There’s an argument in circulation right now that claims the development of the 12-inch single was a more significant pop revolution than punk rock: the 12 inch’s wider grooves allowed for the rise of techniques like mixing and scratching, thus giving birth to hip hop, the sole vanguard of futuristic music left in the Eighties.

Well, this argument is not without polemical merit (unprivileging rock’s sacred cows, rewriting history as ammunition in contemporary struggles, etc) but what strikes me as bogus and itself rockthink is the association of a musical style with moral superiority. Certainly, hip hop/12-inch culture amounts to a revolution in the formal possibilities for music, but if hip hop proves anything, it’s there is no necessary link between musical radicalism and social radicalism, form and content.

Hip hop is an avant-garde wet dream: here is a popular music based around minimalism, dissonance, the supercession of melody and harmony in favour of great slabs and splurges of sound. But it is inadvisable to read into hip hop’s irreverence for musical rules/copyright laws/stylistic integrity, any evidence of resistance to authority.

If the formal irreverence of hip hop is a metaphor for anything, it’s not radicalism, but nihilism. Hip hop’s social consciousness is hardly progressive, rather it’s thoroughly entrenched in American capitalist ideas of self-definition through competition/acquisition/one-upmanship.

And in its more extreme manifestations, the hip hop imagination is drawn to the language of criminamlity--think of Schoolly D, Run DMC’s gangster imagery, Public Enemy (“I’ll show you my gun/My Uzi weighs a ton”). Crime isn’t a subversion of capitalism, but its caricature: an alternative means to the symbols of status used by those for whom conventional channels are blocked by inequality and prejudice.

Criminality is part of hip hop’s fantasy vocabulary because it’s a metaphor of total possibility. In this, hip hop reminds me of nothing so much as punk’s anti-social individualism/”so many ways to get what you want”/anarchist-Antichrist attitude. What’s happened is that hip hop’s psychic extremism has found a perfect expression for itself in avant-garde assault--a mindfuck of a marriage.

All this suggest that hip hop’s “radicalism” is, at best, ambiguous, destructive rather than constructive. Just like punk, in fact. What’s also daft is the implication that to celebrate hip hop necessitates a denigration of rock. This kind of thinking in oppositions is itself a punk hangover. It’s especially inappropriate considering that hip hop increasingly has far more in common with punk/heavy metal/the rock avant-garde (aggressive self-projection, the pursuit of bedlam and oblivion, NOISE) than it does with soul (the expression of desire and loss with poise and dignity, yawn).

Just take the Skinny Boys. Their debut album Weightless, released late last year, had cuts heavier and grislier than anything so far thrown up by rock Noisists like Age of Chance, Test Dept, Ciccone Youth. The Skinny Boys are an example of an astonishing co-incidence between hardcore hop hop and hardcore rock--a similarity not just of effect, but of texture too.

The Skinny Boys are mindblowing. Take a hardcore B-boy track like “Rip the Cut”. Far too slow to dance to, based around a single drone-riff that sounds like someone puking up down a deep well, this monstrous snail of idiocy crushes your consciousness like a scrap-metal compressor. The Skinny Boys seem to be striving to produce the same impact on the listener as hardcore groups like Big Black or Black Flag--a state of aphasia or speechless oblivion, not so much beyond dance as beneath it, perhaps equivalent to the hip hop expression “cold getting dumb”. The only possible response to this kind of music is frozen immobility, “chillin’ in the B-boy stance”.

The Skinny Boys quirk out. A track like “Weightless”, with its eerie, disembodied edit of a little girl’s voice, its waddling rhythm, its farty swell of bass, its human beatbox solo (Dadaesque bodymusic), is as surreal and downright hostile to meaning as anything Beefheart or Pere Ubu have produced.

The Skinny Boys kick ass. “Feed Us the Beat” could be Black Sabbath--a migraine-morose abyss of sound, powered by a drone-riff like a kick in the guts. But whereas Run DMC, LL Cool J and Beastie Boys weld metal guitar onto their sound (the Beasties pilfering the riff from Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” for “Rhymin’ and Stealin’”) the Skinny Boys do it all with scratch (and various studio techniques they are understandably reluctant to divulge).

Again, the “pleasure” of this music seems to be concussive, bashing your brains out, inducing a state of wigged-out catatonia. It suggests an appealing fantasy: if hop hop continues along this course of development, can it be long before we see long tongues, make-up, chainsaws and flamethrower codpieces, barbiturates, Satanism, becoming de rigeur? The Occult would be a logical destination for a subculture that already inverts values, so that “treacherous”, “ill,” “wicked, “damage” all become good things.

Meeting the Skinny Boys in the flesh brings me down from these delirious heights with a swift and ignominious bump. I came expecting to meet three surly monsters of hip hop rock. I find instead three polite, rather sweet brothers, into wholesome pursuits like bowling and basketball. Super Jay is 19 and the DJ of the group. Jock Box is 17 and their human beatbox. Shockin’ Shaun is 18 and the MC. Accompanying them are cousins Rhonda and Mark Bush, who are a bit older and who produce/write for/manage the Skinny Boys. This is a close-knit, family operation--the little girl on “Weightless” is daughter Chrystal Kiayonda Bush. A nice, thoroughly decent, thoroughly American family, from Bridgeport, Connecticut, just outside New York.

It’s unavoidable, I guess, that white rock critics invariably misrecognise black music, bending it to fit their fantasies and schemes. But talking to the Skinny Boys I sometimes wonder if they actually feel their music differently to me. To me, Skinny Boys music is mad; I place it alongside classics of teenage dementia like The Eyes’ “When the Night Falls” or The Groupies’ “Primitive”, music that makes me feel murderous. But I suspect the Skinny Boys see their music as simple entertainment, part of showbiz. Here are some of the things they tell me:

“It all pays off in the end, if you work hard”

“We want a gold album”

“We try to appeal to everyone. We have commercial cuts. We have hardcore B-boy cuts--we’ve got a “Rip the Cut Part Two” coming up. We’ve got a heavy metal track. We even got a jazz cut on this LP.”

“The Skinny Boys like good clean music, so people of all kinds can enjoy it--little kids, middle-sized kids, grown-ups.”

“We respect all entertainers. But we have favourites--LL Cool J, Run DMC, Whodini, Monkees. Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Janet… too many people.”

“Hello London!”

“People see rap as a load of violence and stuff, but what we’re saying in our music is that you’ve got to have ‘Unity’. No matter what colour you are, you’re our brother, y’know.”

Maybe I got it all wrong. Or perhaps The Skinny Boys have a perfect grasp of the form of hip hop, and just don’t need to live out the fantasy. But when “Rip the Cut” rends my flesh, when I catch lyrics like--“When I walk on the stage/I’m like the mainman/Hitler” and “I’m like Jaws/the killer shark/I rip the skin off our face”--am I wrong in thinking that something odd is going on here? Isn’t this a strange kind of fun?

BRAND NUBIAN, One For All
Melody Maker, December 1990.

by Simon Reynolds

Brand Nubian are disciples of the Five Percent Nation. This increasingly influential Afro-American Muslim sect believes that the black man is God and the white man is the Devil. Like other Five Percent rappers (Poor Righteous Teachers, King Sun, Lakim Shabazz), Brand Nubian are into “knowledge” and “holy intellect” and have all been “reborn as a god”.

Nubian refers to the idea of Egypt and Mesopotamia as the motherland, the cradle of civilization, where “Asiatic” blacks invented mathematics and cosmology. On the sleeve, they pay tribute to the “Original black mentality which manifestated [sic] all things in existence.”

All this is interesting, controversial and guaranteed to get nervous whitey in a lather. Musically it would seem to promise an insurgent onslaught of righteous wrath. But paradoxically, on a sonic level, Brand Nubian aren’t militant but dormant. The Nubian sound is an ambling, almost ambient blur of smooth rhymes and feel-good samples: warm, purring electric organs, as relaxing as mainling Ovaltine; mid-pace Meters-type beats; mellow-yellow funk guitar licks. “Wake Up” might be intended to incite ire and raise consciousness, but its effect is soporific. “Feels So Good” feels too good; it’s muted and Muzaky, like a locked groove of Beggar & Co or some similar Brit-funk bantamweight.

Brand Nubian’s downfall (for me, at least) is their “positive attitude”. Confident in their status as the elect, the chosen Five Percent of “poor righteous teachers”, Brand Nubian don’t partake of the contagious paranoia of a Public Enemy. The LP isn’t all laidback, soothing, sleepy-time stuff, however. The go-go inflected “Drop the Bomb” simmers nicely and its military counter-rhythms are the closest One For All gets to militancy. And “Grand Puba, Positive and L.G.” samples the bassline of Steve Arrington’s brilliant techno-funk classic “Nobody Can Be You But You”.

But in the main, what we have here aren’t Niggers With Attitude, but Afro-Americans With Lassitude. NWA and the ghetto/gangster rappers have taken white society’s negative stereotypes of black youth and turned them to their own end, as if to say, “Hey, whitey, your worst fears have come true.” Whereas Brand Nubian, instead of defining themselves in terms of the damage down to them by the system, have chosen a positive identity. Unfortunately, because of this, their music just communicates good vibes and self-assurance. They should rename themselves Bland Nubian.

CHUCK D, interview
Melody Maker, October 12th 1991

by Simon Reynolds


"The first album, Yo, Bum Rush The Show was, like, if
you can't get what you deserve, kick that motherfucking door
down by any means. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Stop Us
was about how there's millions of motherfuckers stopping us
from getting what we need to get. And, from the black
nationalist point of view, there's millions of us holding
ourselves back. Fear Of Black Planet talked about the
paranoia of what race is - white people's problems with
themselves, their misconceptions about race.

"The new album, Apocalypse '91 - The Enemy Strikes
Black is about how we, the black race, have double agents in
our ranks who are contributing to the genocide. In order for
us to get our shit in order, we've gotta get those
motherfuckers. They'll just be outright destroyed, either by
the positive hardcore, or by themselves."

Chuck D looks me over, through hooded eyes, then continues. "From Day One,
I've said that there's no place for people who sell drugs in
the Public Enemy programme. Selling drugs to a seven year
old kid, that's just as lethal as coming by with an axe and
chopping his head off. You wouldn't allow him to do that, so
you shouldn't allow him to sell drugs."

Do you really see pushers as agents of white supremacy?

"Of course. They're victims too, but they're conscious.
They know what they're doing. And when they're doing the
wrong thing, they've got to suffer severe penalties. No more
time for the psychoanalytical approach. We can't feel sorry,
we can't even get emotional. It's damn near prophesised that
the motherfuckers will be slain outright, by the doers of
good over the doers of evil. What's going to happen is the
same thing that developed in South Africa, where the only way
to develop unity and organisation is to eliminate the agents.
In South Africa, they put 'rubber neckties' on them. Here in
America, you're soon gonna see brothers who want to get paid
saying to themselves: 'why bother to sell drugs, why don't I
just stick up and kill drug dealers?' You already got groups
coming up who say 'we love to rob the dope man'. We're gonna
see an apocalyptic situation with the rise of black
vigilanteeism."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It's said that African-American problems have a lot to
do with damaged family structures, with absent or derelict
fathers. I reckon Chuck D wants to be the 'Good Father',
hard but fair, meting out just punishment and putting his
people back on the straight and narrow. That's why he's so
tired this evening, worn-out by his duties. He's been awake
for 24 hours out of the last 28 hours, dealing with the
manifold aspects of Public Enemy, and he has to jet off early
the next morning to give a talk in the Mid-West.

The big conflict in rap right now is between aspiring to
be a "good father" (prophet, teacher, leader) or a "bad boy"
(hoodlum, gangsta). For some, rap's gotten too earnest,
righteous and didactic (you've even got groups appearing with
blackboards and lecterns in their videos). These people wish
rap would go back to the days when it was irresponsible, when
the slogan was "let's get stupid" not "holy intellect". But
others think its time rap grew up, shed its delinquent image.
and ceased reinforcing negative stereotypes of black male
youth. For these people, the inchoate rage of gangsta rappers
and ghetto youth needs to be channelled away from petty crime
and macho tantrums, into an orderly revolutionary programme.

"The new album's lesson is 'no more fun and games',"
says Chuck D. "There's no room for kids here. The black
situation needs less adolescents aged over eighteen. Fun and
games have got to be tucked to the side; responsibility and
business have got to take precedence. The album deals with
the whole question of what 'hardcore' means. The positive
hardcore is much harder than the negative hardcore. Negative
hardcore" - Chuck means gangsta rap like NWA - "is the easy
way out. Going round shooting brothers, beating them down -
that don't make you hard. Gangsta rap is street, but
political rap is a level above that, because once you
understand the streets then you're political. Gangsta rap has
lots of good stories, but it doesn't understand the structure
behind those stories. If you don't understand the situation,
you're gonna end up victimised by it."

If rap is suffering from a malaise right now, it's
because it's gotten so successful, it's fragmented; its
momentum has dispersed as people disagree about "the way
forward".

"People are saying rap's getting stale. Rap's not getting
stale; there are problems, but you've got to have a mechanic
that knows the motor rather than someone from outside. One
problem is that a lot of people are not controlling what they
create. Rap is selling more than it's ever sold, but the
industry has got this throw-shit-against-the-wall-and-see-
what-sticks mentality. Too many groups are novices in all
other situations apart from making the music. And they are
getting exploited. You can sell a whole load of records and
the record companies will tell you all the money went on
promotion. And that's where the game comes into play, and
whether you know what the game is and how to play it."

You sound personally bitter about your experiences with
the music industry.

"I'm not bitter, I understand it, where a lot of groups
don't understand it. You always get into a fight with
structures. A lot of people don't know the history of black
music, and how the jazz greats and the blues greats were
ripped off. At CBS alone, Aretha Franklin was exploited,
Johny Mathis was exploited, Sly Stone, Earth Wind And Fire
.... Everybody gets screwed over, I get screwed over - but I
know how to fight."

The last time I interviewed Public Enemy, in late 1987,
I claimed that their aggression, noise, militancy, brutalism,
made them far closer to ROCK than contemporary black music.
It was a contentious argument at the time, but since then the
"Bring The Noise" remake with Anthrax has validated it. Then
there's the fact that Chuck D doesn't like disco and doesn't
like R&B ballads, but loves heavy metal. "Metal has attitude
and it has speed, and that's two things that I like." More
than that, he admires metal groups for having their shit
under control.

"I've been to a few metal shows, and they were a
learning experience for me, in that I learned what I was
being shorted on when it comes to live rap shows. Sound
technicians and lighting technicians know how to enhance
metal groups to the max, but they don't know how to get a
good sound for rap. Seeing metal shows, I realised that rap
groups are missing out on a lot. One thing I know about
metal is that the attitude is there, and even though I
personally give out a lot to my audience, I know that other
rap groups can learn from metal when it comes to kicking out
to their audience. Metal records give a lot more in terms of
sleeve information and imagery. That's why metal groups stay
tight with their audiences for so long. A metal group's
career is like this" - his hand draws an undulating but
steadily rising graph curve in the air - "while a rap career
is like this" - he gestures a steep graph line that peaks
quickly then plummets. "In rap, groups are treated like
they're disposable, and so they become disposable. Heavy
metal groups are involved in how their their music is
presented, packaged, marketed. They have control of the
merchandising and their logos, whereas the vast majority of
rap groups have no control at all."

A shame metal groups don't do something more imaginative
with their total control, really. Still Chuck D genuinely
seems to believe rap and metal have a lot of common: Public
Enemy's upcoming tour with Anthrax is an attempt to tap into
the white headbanger market. One thing that Public Enemy's
kind of rap shares with Anthrax and Metallica's kind of metal
is an apocalyptic vibe. In righteous rap, as in doomsday
thrash, the lyrics speak of chaos and imminent devastation,
while the music embodies survivalist discipline in the face
of that threat. After the bewilderment and doubt of Fear Of
A Black Planet, Apocalypse '91 is a return to resilience,
spiritual stamina, girded loins. Musically, the new album's
not as varied as Fear; it's straight-slamming, rock solid
Public Enemy, the only real musical departure being "By The
Time I Get To Arizona", which pivots on a boogie bassline so
bad-ass it's stinks up your room.

Chuck D runs through some of the more notable issues
addressed on the album.

"The opening track, "Lost At Birth" is about how we as a
people were lost at birth, but now we
have to find ourselves. We do have a common bond. Excuses
are played the fuck out. In a time of war, equip yourself.
Equip yourself with what it takes to survive in the modern
world. The next track "Rebirth" deals with that problem:
how to reinstate your situation, get back the pride that we
had in the motherland.

"Night Train" talks about how, in the
black structure, we all look alike, but some people aren't
black inside like they claim to be. Everybody's riding the
same train, but for the shit to roll right, those people got
to be thrown off the train. They could be sitting right next
to you but you just can't trust 'em; they could be a pimp or
a murderer or a drug pusher. You've got to judge people by
their actions, not just by their black skin. You got devils
that come in all colours, all shapes and sizes. You got
grafta devils - 'grafta' meaning white, because whites are an
an offshoot or graft from the original black race. And you
got devils that look just like you. How you gonna treat
those people? You got to take them outa here." He makes a
sound like a pistol shot.

"'Can't Truss It' is about how the corporate world of
today is just a different kind of slavery. We don't control
what we create. And 'cos of the media, we don't control the
way we think or run our lives. We've got to limit working for
a situation that's other than ours. We have no ownership of
anything. If you don't own businesses, then you don't have
jobs. White people have jobs because they have businesses.
They have institutions that teach them how to live in
America. Black people don't have instititions that teach them
how to deal with shit. The number one institution that
teaches you how to deal is the family, but slavery fucked
that up. So the song is about the ongoing cost of the
holocaust. There was a Jewish holocaust, but there's a black
holocaust that people still choose to ignore."

"'By The Time I Get to Arizona' is about how there's two
states left in America that don't enforce the Martin Luther
King holiday: Arizona and New Hampshire. 'Move!' is about how
there's work to do. If you're over eighteen and you're acting
like a kid, get out of the way. The men are taking over.
Positive hardcore's gonna get the job done.

"'One Million Bottle Bags' is about the malt liquor
problem in Black America. Malt liquor has twice as much
alcohol content and twice as many residues, that's to say,
waste products from regular beer. It's fucked up beer, with
more alcohol. Instead of making people laidback, it makes
them hostile. And it leads to a lot of black on black
violence in America. They have massive campaigns for this
shit that are targeted at the black community. Malt liquors
are made by the major brewers in this country. When they put
their regular beers through the filters, all the excess
bullshit they push to the black community. And it's been
killing motherfuckers for the longest period.

"Lately one particular brand of malt liquor has been
advertised using rappers. And in one commercial [starring Ice
Cube] they sampled my voice. And a lot of people rang me and
asked was I down with it. They thought I'd endorsed it. So
I'm suing that company. I wrote "I Million Bottlebags" five
months prior to any of this legal shit. But when I found out
about the commercial, it was a slap in the face."

In Boyz In The Hood, a brilliant new film about life
in black Los Angeles (which incidentally features Ice Cube as
a malt liquor drinking youth) there's a Good Father character
who argues that it's no coincidence that there's a liquor
store and a gunshop in every black neighbourhood. He claims
it's part of conspiracy whose goal is the genocide of black
America. Do you agree?

"Of course. A liquor store, a gunshop and a drug dealer
on every corner. You go to a place like Louisville and
there's a liquor store every five blocks. And the type of
liquor they sell is stuff that's primarily targeted for black
consumption. Higher alcohol content, less healthy
ingredients, more bullshit. A quicker high, but more
devastation in the long run. I had two uncles in the past
year who died of liver disease. Personally, I 've never seen
the purpose of smoking or drinking. With other people, it's
their prerogative to do what they want. But on this issue,
there's two points. A lot of black on black violence is
caused by this liquor, it's distorted a lot of motherfuckers
mentality - they get into arguments, and if they've got a
gun, then somebody gets shot. The other factor is, I tell the
black community, if you're gonna drink anything, at least
drink what white folks drink.

"'Shut 'Em Down' is about major corporations like Nike
taking profits from the black community, but not giving
anything back, never opening businesses in black areas. And
it's saying that the best way to boycoot a business is to
start your own. 'A Letter To The New York Post' is about
how, whenever the Post covers a story concerning black
people, it's very one sided. They like to make out it's them
niggas fucking up again. They're like The Sun - onesided,
sensationalistic, trying to get readers at any cost. They'll
thrive on a racist situation. We've been misrepresented in
the New York Post a few times.

"'Get The Fuck Outta Dodge' is about apartheid in
America, in the form of noise pollution laws which are
designed so that you can't drive your car through a white
neighbourhood with your system playing loud. And I'm saying
when the shit gets that crazy, you've just got to get the
fuck out of town. I got stopped a while back for playing my
system too loud, cos I was a black guy riding through a white
neighbourhood in a jeep.

"Fear Of Black Planet dabbled in all kind of creative
avenues, the music was very broad. Sometimes I made
statements, sometimes I just presented a range of opinions
for the listener to pick and choose. A lot of the lyrics I
put questions marks at the end of them, to tell the listener,
'you figure it out, I don't know the answer'. This album I'm
hammering home specific points, saying you got to take care
of your own shit. Musically, it's very focussed too.

"With Fear Of A Black Planet, my bewilderment was the
question of who set race up. You have a limited amount of
time in your life, and yet the world is trillions of years
old, there's so much history. How much can any one person
master?"

That's the reason conspiracy theories are so appealing;
they simplify the confusion of history, give it a structure
you can grasp. It's tempting to imagine a plot (in both the
'narrative' and 'conspiracy' senses of the word) simply in
order to made the data overload manageable .

"You have data and you have counter-data. The data that
there is comes because it was written by people with a
certain perspective. I try to deal with things that are fact,
like slavery. One reason the Jewish people's story is so
strong is that it's recent and it's documented. In "Can't
Truss It" I talk about how it's hard to believe that for two
hundred years ships sailed the ocean with a cargo of slaves.
That's a holocaust. Jews are screaming over the 1932-1945
period - that's the headline for their story of persecution
which stretches back to the Middle Ages. The black holocaust
goes back centuries too, but we don't have that headline. We
don't document and we don't shout about it like we should."

LETTER FROM NYC: RAP PAYBACK, column
Melody Maker, February 15th 1992

by Simon Reynolds

When Apocalypse ‘91 came out, it felt like Public Enemy were in a rut. Sure, they still gave good interview, but the music was breaking no new ground and even the rap/metal link-up with Anthrax seemed old hat. But, over here, Public Enemy have managed to put themselves back on the cutting edge. Releasing their new single, “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (by far the best track on the LP, with its superbad-ass stink-funk riff) in time for Martin Luther King Day on January 20, PE have ignited a national furore.

See, Arizona is the only state that doesn’t recognize King’s birthday. And PE’s video is a “revenge fantasy” in which Security of The First World paramilitaries assassinate a local senator with a poisoned candygram and detonate a bomb under the state governor’s car. These inflammatory scenes are juxtaposed with re-enactments of King’s assassination and the civil rights struggles of the Sixties (blacks being splattered with food for sitting in whites-only diners or being expelled from apartheid buses). The ensuing controversy has put PE on the TV news and the front covers of America’s most mainstream papers.

On one hand, you sympathise with the outrage that prompted Chuck D to dub Arizona a “devil’s haven”--in 1990, the Arizona electorate rejected two proposals to re-establish a paid King holiday. Can you blame Chuck D for interpreting this to mean that most Arizonans would like to roll back the civil rights gains of the Sixties and return to Fifties-style segregation? At the same time, the video jars with Martin Luther King’s creed on non-violent protest and has been duly censured by civil rights activists and King’s family as a disgrace to his memory. Public Enemy’s riposte to that is, “while Dr King may have stood for non-violence, we wonder what he would have stood for after that bullet ripped violently through his neck. Being assassinated will often change your political viewpoint." Ho hum.

So is the video a valid symbolic expression of black rage, a publicity stunt for a group suffering the mid-career stagnation blues or a naked incitement to political violence? In a call-in poll, over 60% of MTV viewers supported the promo as legitimate protest and rejected the notion that it could encourage violence. But Public Enemy themselves have never said the video should not be taken literally; Chuck D’s declared belief in “a tooth for a tooth, a head for a head” suggests the opposite.

Where do us white liberals stand? Probably, like me, all over the place. On one hand, you empathise with the rage, especially considering the backdrop of escalating bias attacks (two black children just got sprayed with white paint) or the bid by the “former” neo-Nazi David Duke for the governership of Louisiana. At the same time, you feel perturbed by reports of paranoia in the PE camp: Chuck D (who’s been described as a man who’s never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like) apparently believes that AIDS, Muhammed Ali’s speech problem and Richard Pryor’s multiple sclerosis are all part of a government anti-Black plot, while Sister Souljah’s new record imagines a President David Duke reinstating slavery--in 1995!

But wherever you stand or falter, there’s one thing you have to admit with more than a trace of awe. Four albums in, Public Enemy still do what no rock band today can seemingly pull off: not just comment on, but connect with, real issues, real stakes in the outside world; aggravate the contradictions, make the wounds rawer and harder to ignore. Compared with that, the petty debates and dissensions of “alternative music” seem awful puny....

DE LA SOUL, interview
Melody Maker, May 25th 1991

by Simon Reynolds


De La Soul may not be dead, but positivity smells kinda funny.

When 3 Feet High & Rising came out in 1989, De La Soul were in perfect sync with the favourable signs of the time. They revolutionised rap, replacing its stock emotions of rage, paranoia and hypertension with a new spirit of affirmation and togetherness. Along with Soul II Soul, they popularised the creed of positivity; Deee-Lite were their cartoon lovechild.

But suddenly, in the middle of 1990, Soul II Soul's new decade turned out to be a false new dawn for humankind. Even as Deee-Lite were putting the finishing touches to World Clique, the outlook for peacedelic unity abruptly deteriorated. The Eastern European revolutions merely opened a fresh can of worms (ethnic tensions, the spectre of neo-fascism); Gorby put the brakes on glasnost and the recession kicked in, putting intolerable stress on an already frayed social fabric. To cap it all, there was even a war, the biggest since World War II, with an increasingly grim aftermath of Kurdish agony and ecological woe.

With the global trend toward misery exposing the triteness of positivity's platitudes, there was no way De La Soul could return with a simple reiteration of 3 Feet High, hence De La Soul Is Dead.

Superficially, the new album sounds like no huge departure; there's the same slaphappy-go-lucky beats, goofy rhymes and lazy haze of samples, the same rather wearisome preponderance of skits and spoofs, running jokes and comedic interludes. But something has changed, the cover image (a knocked over flower pot and an uprooted, dead daisy) and the videos (black and white, as opposed to the dayglo Sesame Street hues of yore) symbolically underline a crucial shift in tone. Probe a little deeper beneath the sublime scat-doggerel lyrics and the disarmingly easy-going pace, and you'll find murkier, nastier undercurrents.

‘Please Porridge’ is based around a deceptively jaunty sample of Twenties tap dance music, but its lyric takes pains to point out that just because De La Soul are laid-back doesn't mean they'll let any one walk over them. Posdnuos and Dove warn that if you bug 'em, you'll get sprayed with Black Flag (a pesticide). ‘Bitties In The BK Lounge’ is a sour diatribe against the two-faced attitudes of the starstruck, loosely based on a real-life incident in a burger joint in which a waitress treated De La Soul with disdain, then drooled over them when she realised they were famous.
‘Ring Ring’ is a weary whinge about being pestered by aspiring rappers with demo tapes. The gorgeously r(h)apsodic ‘Pass The Plugs’ turns out, on closer inspection, to be a veritable litany of gripes (about radio, their record company, "pimp promoters", talk show host Arsenio Hall, De La copyists etc ad nauseam). Even the record sleeve's list of acknowledgements include various pointed "Fuck you's" to De La Soul's foes.

Clearly De La Soul have no truck with the idea that fame carries with it an obligation to be gracious about its many aggravations; they resent being public property. Then there's the socially aware songs; the anti-drug parable of ‘My Brother Is A Basehead’, a withering portrait of Posdnuos' sibling who became the "lowest of elements" after getting into "nasal sports"; and the stand-out track ‘Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa’, another true-to-life tale of child abuse set to a breeding backdrop of agonized blues guitar.

On repeated listens, De La Soul Is Dead emerges as a subdued, sprawling, ‘bleaker’ but altogether more ambitious record than the sunny 3 Feet High. Revealing a hitherto unsuspected capacity for cynicism and petty malice, the new album shatters the group's image as amiable rap clowns and replaces it with something far more complicated and interesting.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Naturally, De La Soul themselves see continuity rather than a drastic break with their past.

"With us, positivity was never about going around with a stupid grin saying, 'Hi, peace y'all, let's all be happy'," says Posdnuos through heavily-congested sinuses. "On the first album we had songs that dealt with social issues. We dealt with drug use on 'Say No Go', but it wasn't that personal, whereas 'My Brother Is A Basehead' deals with drugs from personal experience. The overall vibe of the new LP is not happy go lucky. But it is like 3 Feet High & Rising, in that there's positive elements and there's songs that deal with a negative situation, but trying to strive for a positive solution to it."

Did you find the positivity fad rapidly degenerated into inane platitudes?

Dove: "No, but it did get a little worn down, cos everybody was doing it. A lot of people lost sight of the fact that being positive means being aware of negativity, and trying to resolve it."

Posdnuos: "But there’s not one cut on 3 Feet High where we straight out said 'peace'. The 'hippy hop' thing was always something that the critics invented. ‘Me Myself & I’ was about not being like everybody else, 'Say No Go' was anti-drugs, 'Buddy’ was about being with the one you want to be with. What happened was the critics saw the overall vibe and look of the album and said we was about peace."

‘Please Porridge’ seems to be your rejoinder to the people who mistook your rejection of rap aggression for being weak or soft.

Dove: "That song's just saying that if people want to test us, we're not gonna stand for it. Just cos we spoke about being peaceful and positive, it doesn't mean we're gonna let ourselves be trampled on. We will do whatever it takes to defend ourselves. There have been situations where people tried to test us, and we defended ourselves, and whether it was worse for us or for them, it doesn't really matter."

Were these people gangsta rappers who thought the peacedelic attitude was wimpy?

"It wasn't even rappers, it was just kids of different ages that we met in clubs. They'd come to see our show, so it wasn't to do with music, it was just them wanting to test us as so-called peaceful people."

Then there was the strife on the LL Cool J tour, climaxing in De La being kicked off the tour for perpetrating violence!

"It wasn't trouble for us, it was trouble for them. We aren't people who have feelings and hold them inside. The people on the LL tour just didn't realise we were as open and forthright as we are. They treated us rotten. It was a learning process. You learn, especially if you're the last group on the bill, beneath Slick Rick and LL. We saw the bad side, and we got kicked off, because we stood for what we felt was right."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Various songs on the new album suggest that you feel a certain bitterness about the costs of fame.

Posdnuos: "All we're doing is writing about how we feel at one point. When you function everyday, you think of millions of thoughts each day you exist. But we can't put millions of thoughts and feelings on each piece of wax, because that’s just a record of where you are that day 'Ring Ring' is about how a certain kind of person had been bothering us, at a time when we really couldn't deal with being bothered. People don't realise that we're one group that really tries to be involved in all our business, every aspect of being a group.

"Often we're on our way somewhere to do something real important and people see it as their only opportunity to get to us. Half the time these kids are talking to us and they're so misguided you really need a couple of hours to straighten them out about how to work in the music business. 'Ring Ring' is about being bounded by these people and not having the time."

Dove: "The first album was the mood of us just getting into the business, and this one is about us being in the business. I'm not saying it's the worst thing that we ever experienced in our lives, but…"

What are the positive rewards of fame and success?

Dove: "You get a better life."

Posdnuos: "There are a lot of obligations, but you get a chance to do something positive. You have the options and the tools to do it. We can express what we feel, and people will buy what we're expressing. And the fact that we have influenced other artists is cool."

How closely does ‘My Brother Is A Basehead’ cleave to the truth?

Posdnuos: "Well, my brother is now in rehab, but it's basically a true story. Basehead is slang for someone who freebases or smokes crack. When he was basin', I had strong feelings about it. Some people might have thought it was too personal for them to write about, but I really didn’t care. It helped get it off my chest, plus I thought a lot of people could identify with it and it could help people.
Word by word, it's not following what actually happened, but it's close. It relates how we grew up together and how his downfall began."

Is he not somewhat miffed that you used his tale of woe as material?

"I really don't know – I don't speak to him. I really don't f*** with him too much. Even though he's trying to do better now, he's f***ed up so much in life that I really can't deal with him. He knows I've written the song, but obviously he can't do shit about it."

And what's the story behind ‘Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa’?

"That's also about a friend of mine who unfortunately was being molested by her father. It turned out that all of us knew a person who was going through that. But this was something so close to me that I wanted to express it on wax. In reality, it didn't go as for as her pulling a pistol on her father. The story is fictional, but the emotions are real."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Overall, it seems like De La Soul’s colours were yellow and orange, but now your palette is all greys and blues and blacks.

Dove: "The new album is much harder in sound and heavier in concept. It's good to do something different. If we had done something exactly the same as 3 Feet High & Rising, we would have watered the whole scene down. Cos a lot of people have been doing the same thing, the same colours, the same style."

Do you worry that people will find the album a bit of a downer?

Posdnuos: "From what I've heard, everyone loves it -- industry people, critics, friends. People who are straight up De La Soul fans will love it, I think, because it's really a much stronger album than the first one. But those people who were just into De La Soul cos 3 Feet High & Rising reminded them of their Woodstock days, might not like it. Those people should listen closely because then they'll realise that it goes a lot further than a lot of rap albums will ever go."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What do you think of the state of rap? It strikes me as scattered and stagnant.

"It's in a real wack state," says Dove. "It's in a stand still. There's nothing new. Like before it was all from the heart, now it's less heart, more business. It’s like, if Salt 'N' Pepa did well, companies look to get another Salt 'N' Pepa. It’s all about dollars now."

My impression is that the rap community is divided into factions (the gangsta/ghetto boys, the righteous prophet-rappers, your peacedelic buddies in the Native Tongue movement, the old school survivors and revivalists) who all see themselves as the way forward.

"We don't see ourselves as a movement," Dove continues. "Native Tongue is just a name for us, The Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest and some others, but there's no set style. De La Soul do songs where we're preaching, songs where we're changing our characters, songs that a hoodlum or gangsta could relate to, songs that are just about fun. We don't stay in one style. At the moment we like groups like Brand Nubian, Leaders Of The New School, Son of Bazerk, but we don't downfall any rappers. We don't even downfall people like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Everyone’s part of the same rap community."

Doesn't it feel like everyone’s waiting for the next great leap forward?

"Even De La Soul is waiting," Posdnuos says. "We all wonder what the next step is. It could lie in working with live bands. We were involved in this ‘MTV Unplugged' show where LL Cool J and us played with a live band. That was real cool. And we played some instruments on the new album, and we got people in to play some stuff. I think sampling's been taken as far as it can be taken. We're watching and we're waiting, and when the new thing happens we'll see if we can be down with that too."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Like 3 Feet High & Rising, the new album displays what US critic Greg Tate described as De La Soul's "Fear Of No Music" attitude. As well as the usual archive of obscure disco, R & B and jazz-funk records, on De La Soul Is Dead, the group sample from such un-rap sources as Serge Gainsbourg, Frankie Valli, Wayne Fontana, Chicago and The Doors.

Dove: "Our sampling goes to any category of music you can name. There is every kind of music in our house. And it goes beyond music, to sound effects, instruments, toys, sounds that we make with objects."

This time around, you seem to prefer less recognisable samples.

Posdnuos: "That's not to do with the litigation problems that we had, it's more like a reaction against the fad of sampling something that was famous. With rap now, coming up with a real familiar loop isn't important any more. We feel relying on a famous sample overshadows what we do in terms of arrangement."

It sounds like you're using fantastically obscure records (the only one I recognised was the vamp from ‘Touch Me’ by The Doors).

"That delayed the album because a lot of what we sample was so old that it was hard to track down who owned the track, or whether they was even alive! A couple of the people we dealt with were sort of at the senile stage. They didn't even know what rap was!"

LETTER FROM NYC: BUM RAP, column
Melody Maker, January 30th 1993

By Simon Reynolds

Alternative rockers from the Chili Peppers to Sonic
Youth rallied eagerly to MTV's "Rock The Vote" crusade:
underneath the urgency with which they exhorted kids to
register, you could clearly read the message "VOTE CLINTON".
But rappers were conspicuous by their abstention. Ice T
couldn't be bothered to express a preference between the
candidates, while post-election, an underwhelmed Ice Cube
declared that now he was looking forward to getting "Clinton
out of the White House."

You could hardly blame the hip hop community for feeling
uninvolved. Clinton went out of his way to placate white
fears, with his strategic masterstroke of dissing Sister
Souljah, his cold shouldering of black leaders like Jesse
Jackson, and his often-aired plan to put 100,000 more cops on
the streets. Of course, you could hardly blame Clinton for
doing what he had to do to lure the Reagan Democrats (the
white, worried middle class) back into the fold. This was
politics as usual, and a lot of Black Americans gritted their
teeth and accepted it.

What was truly unnerving and despicable was the deafening
silence maintained by all the candidates concerning the LA
riots. In the Middle Ages, popular revolt functioned as a
form of petition. Rioters knew that the uprising would be
quelled, but they also knew the King would pay attention and
make an effort to alleviate their woes. But the LA riots
failed to elicit such a response from the political classes,
bar some woffle about creating 'enterprise zones' to
encourage business to move into the destitute inner cities.

So what do you do if you're black, from the ghetto, and
the most virulent and visible explosion of your pain and fury
has been swept under the carpet? The rap equivalent of
rioting is songs like Ice T's "Cop Killer" and Paris' "Bush
Killa": unconstructive, if perfectly justifiable, expressions
of rage, symbolic and ultimately sterile. These songs remind
me of Morrissey's petulant fantasy "Margaret On The
Guillotine", written at Thatcherism's zenith, when it seemed
the "good folk" were outnumbered by the loadsamoney majority.
The problem with the "killa" songs is that rage is vented
in the instantly gratifying fantasy of revenge, rather than
channelled into politics (which takes a lot longer to get
results).

In the pilot issue of Vibe, a new rap culture
mag, Greg Tate agonises over whether hardcore rap is just a
"momentary containment of [black anger] or worse, an
entertaining displacement?" For Tate, rap's problem is that
it's "agenda-less. It reacts better than it proposes."
Despite hip hop's astonishing cultural victory (its
permeation of US society from advertising to fashion), it's
yet to prove itself as "a harbinger of the black revolution".

In truth, hip hop is going through a bit of a
slack, directionless phase, and its problems are aesthetic as
much as political. Public Enemy's music has gotten mighty
tired: maybe Chuck D's recent pilgrimage to Africa will
rejuvenate, although the black Clash might end up recording a
Sandinista style turkey. The only sonic innovators around
are Cypress Hill, with their Hispanic-flavored, 'blunted'
vibe (a blunt is a special kind of joint), and Arrested
Development, who were last year's De La Soul, i.e.
bourgeois-turned-bohemian art-rap. And the only really
magnetic characters are Treach from Naughty by Nature and Ice
Cube, whose charisma and intelligence sustains their solid
but unimaginative music. The rest of rap is awful samey,
from butt-fixated crossovers like Mixalot's "Baby's Got Back"
and WrecksN'Effect's "Rump Shaker", to the underground's
unremarkable variations on the same old gangsta/B-boy themes.

Apart from the braggart bitch-dissing, hardcore rap's
main message is it's own refusal to cross over. This
fretting over "authenticity", which is partly an anxiety to
keep whites (as consumers and performers) out, has had a
inhibiting effect on the music. The retreat to old school
purism means every record revolves around the same formula: a
mid-pace funky beat, "phat" bassline, and looped samples
(usually jazzy horn-squawks or Hammond ripples). The
"authenticity" school of thought is articulated by the rap
magazine The Source (its name connotes roots, heritage). If
only the highbrow detachment of Vibe* could be combined with
the fanzine-like street-level patriotism of The Source, then
hip hop would have a magazine that could set challenges for
the music rather than follow in its wake. Rap sorely needs
such an injection of impetus.



* no really that's what Vibe was like in those days! Greg Tate was a regular contributor and not that out of step with/further out than the rest of the contents.

CYPRESS HILL, Black Sunday
Melody Maker, July 31st 1993

by Simon Reynolds

The first words you hear are "I wanna get high", and the rest of
Black Sunday is riddled with references to blunts and bongs.
Outspoken advocates for the legalization of hemp, Cypress Hill's
'blunted' sound defines hardcore hip hop today. The first time I
heard the term, I assumed 'blunted' had something to with dope taking
the edge off aggression, mellowing macho tensions into stoned, woozy
cameraderie. Actually, it comes from the Phillies Blunt, a cigar
which B-boys hollow out to make enormous joints. But my original
misapprehension actually fits Cypress Hill's fuzzy, muggy sound
perfectly: their laidback songs simmer with a violence just barely
held in check.

It's so right that this LP's release coincides with a record US
heatwave. Cypress Hill capture that humid, heat-hazy unreal feel
where walking the streets is like being inside a bad dream. Cypress'
music blurs the borderlines between psychedelic and psychotic. The
songs sound deceptively jaunty (the samples are all upful slices of
Sixties soul, Meters-style proto-funk, jump-blues, doo-wop), but the
lowest-of-the-low-end bass exudes a baleful, viscous menace. Rappers
B-Real and Sen Dog's nonchalant nursery rhyme delivery only increases
the marrow-chilling quality of the lyrics, a non-stop namedrop of
weapon slang (gats, glocks, AK's, sawn-offs, et al). The cartoon
violence ("coming out blasting like Yosemite Sam") and the jeering
"nya nya nya" playground chorus of "Hand On the Glock" add to the
impression that gangsta-ville is populated with overgrown schoolboys.

Talk about arrested development: Cypress Hill's world is so
retarded it's almost prepubescent. If there's no misogyny here, it's
only cos it's a boy's own world. The only tender line on the album
is "I love you, Mary Jane"--and it's not about a girl. Cypress aren't
as deeply into male-bonding as those other current hardcore rulers,
Onyx (slam-dancing slapheads whose chant is 'let the boys be boys!').
But their world is chastely fixated on two things: stupefaction
("Legalise It", "Hits From The Bong") and paranoia ("Insane In the
Brain", the creepy "Cock The Hammer", where samples shimmer like
spectres in the far corner of your vision).

Cypress Hill's soundscaper DJ Muggs is inspired, but he's a
fundamentalist. Shunning the arty advances of the post-De La Soul
bohemians, he takes rap back to the old school days when "get a
little stupid and pump that bass" was the rallying cry. Despite
their Cuban/Italian-American/Mexican composition, Cypress refer to
themselves as "niggas", in solidarity with the black lumpen-
proletariat. "Real-ness" is gangsta rap's watchword these days.
Ironically, the quest to be harder and realer than the rest has
spiralled out of control, resulting in a grotesque cartoon of ghetto
reality. Cypress' shrill loops of horn or soul-screams (the "kettle's
boiling!" effect invented by the Bomb Squad) make me think of a
'Beano' angry bloke with steam coming out his ears, blowing his lid.

Black Sunday is samey, thematically (it's all about getting
wasted or wasting the other guy) and musically (there are no
departures like the debut's sultry "Latin Lingo"). It's a
consolidation of DJ Muggs' influential sound, not an evolution. The
feeling of continuity is increased by quotes from earlier songs,
while "Hand On The Glock" is a (brilliant) remake of the debut's
"Hand On the Pump". But it's a magnificent, malevolent monotony.
Black Sunday is a chiller-thriller that'll have your blood running
cold even as the thermometer tops 99.

HIP HIP HOP BOOK REVIEWS
Melody Maker, early 1994

by Simon Reynolds

A decade ago, and a decade after the event, punk was the hot topic in pop academia. Today, hip hop is Number One in the cultural studies chart, although there are signs that rave will soon overtake it. Tricia Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University Press) is by far the best treatise on hip hop yet. Being of a left-wing, black nationalist bent, Rose is keen to validate rap culture as a proto-revolutionary force, but happily, she's not blinkered by her beliefs. Instead she has a nicely paradoxical sense of rap's contradictions. In her analysis, hip hop simulataneously celebrates black community yet reflects the internicine warfare that sets brother against brother; it's fiercely capitalistic (rappers' obsession with getting 'paid in full') yet contains a critique of capitalism's dehumanising effects. Musically, rap pays homage to black music tradition (R&B, soul, jazz, P-funk) yet wreaks iconoclastic damage to that tradition (via sampling).Capturing rap's contradictions, Rose deftly defends hip hop against the attacks of both the white Right and the black bourgeois establishment (who see gangsta rap as a disgrace to the race, with its promotion of 'negative stereotypes' of the young black male).

There's some fascinating historical/urban geographical stuff about rap's origins in the South Bronx. Rose sees it as a cultural response to the economic policies that literally ghettoised the area. Rap's resistance is embodied in the three formal characteristics--flow, layering and rupture-- that Rose identifies running through hip hop culture from graffiti and breakdancing to scratching/sampling and rapping. Hip hop simulates the urban warzone, yet simultaneously incarnates a survivalist response to its constant threats. Hip hop is full of ruptures--scratches, ambushes of samples, breaks--but incorporates them into the flow.

My only problem with Rose's approach is that she's so keen to validate hip hop that she glosses the extent to which a big part of its appeal is that it's nasty. A lot of rap is just black heavy metal, powertrippin' fantasies for testosterone-crazed adolescents. Snoop Doggy Dogg is Sid Vicious (always a more important part of the Pistols' and punk's appeal than cult-studs academics like to believe); both appealed because they're evil muthafuckers.

Brian Cross' excellent It's Not About A Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (Verso) offers a corrective to Rose's East Coast-centric history of rap. As well as interviewing a host of names obscure and obvious, Cross provides an urban geography of LA rap, and traces its history back through blacksploitation movies, the Watts Prophets (LA's Last Poets), to street-poetry forms like toastin', boastin', signifyin' and the dozens. Some of the flava of this oral culture can be gleaned from Juba To Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, edited Clarence Major (Penguin). From the 1880's verb 'knock a joe' (a convict's term for mutilating oneself to avoid chain-gang labour), through 1940's slang like 'crumbcrusher' (a baby) and 'swobble' (eat food in a hurry), through to post-rap words like 'body bag' (condom), this is a treasury of linguistic flair. My only criticism: the book should have extended its coverage to Afro-Caribbean patois.

Finally, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (Routledge). Despite its Erik B & Rakim title, this isn't a hip hop book, but an essential anthology of up-to-the-minute essays by all the big names in cult.studs.. The best are Susan McLary's brilliant piece on the history of moral panics about music, from Christian thinkers like John of Salisbury and Calvin (who feared that church music was getting too sensual and 'feminine'), through Adorno (who described jazz as 'eunuch-like') to the hysteria about rock'n'roll's jungle rhythms. And Lawrence Grossberg's treatise on the recurrent rhetoric of 'rock's death', in which he concludes that something has changed. Rock is no longer the centre of youth culture. Apparently kids spend twice as much time listening to music as they did in the '70s but it's way down the list of things that matter to them; music is something they use, rather than invest in. As Grossberg puts it: "rather than dancing to the music you like, you like the music you can dance to".

JAY-Z, The Blueprint
Uncut, autumn 2001

by Simon Reynolds

This is supposed to be Jay-Z's big comeback. Which is odd 'cos he's been "away" a year, and the last album sold a couple of million. Then again, the one before sold more, and the album before that shifted five mill. So the perception was that Jay-Z had fallen off significantly (and bar the Neptunes-produced monstergroove "I Just Wanna Love U," the last record did show signs of burn-out) while the hype is "Jay-Z reclaims the throne"--a coup almost unprecedented in the merciless, high-turnover world of rap supastardom.

Clearly the embattled star felt he had much to prove, because it's all nonstop Jay-Z: no verses farmed out to proteges from his Roc-A-Fella camp, and the only celebrity guest is Eminem, whose flow on "Renegade" is so dense and twisting it damn near sprains your brain. The CD booklet shouts out "To This Whole Fake Bulls**t Industry, Thanx 4 being so Fake and Keeping me on my Toes!!!," and the lyrics stomp down various upstarts who'd been sniping that Jay was slippin'. "Takeover" absolutely DESTROYS Nas, ridiculing his output ("that's a one hot album in every ten years average") and boasting alpha-male style of fucking his girl ("you know who/did you know what/with you know who"). The track is based on The Doors's "Five To One" (Morrison hoarsely hollering "gonna win, yeah/we takin' over") and there's more inspired pop intertexuality when the chorus from Bowie's "Fame" is transformed into a series of deathblow disses: "that's why you're... LAAAAAME!!!".

If The Blueprint is a triumph, it's one of form over content: Jay-Z's got nothing new to say, but loads of fresh twists on the same-old same-old. Plus he's always been able to cherrypick the hottest tracks from the most inventive trackmasters, and the sonics here are relentlessly ear-catching. Almost every tune sounds like a hit: Kanye West's insanely catchy Jackson 5-based "Izzo," the swampy reggaematic fonk of Timbaland's "Hola Hovito", the drum 'n'bassy tympani thunder of Bink's "All I Need," Just Blaze's "U Don't Know" with its sped-up diva histrionics like parakeets on amyl, the crunchy-yet-wet percussion and snakecharmer melodics of Poke & Tone's "Jigga That N***a" .

Apart from Jay's mic' hogging, the most striking thing about The Blueprint is how deeply steeped it is in 70s soul. Ignoring the fact that this music's melt-your-hard-heart tenderness was originally radically opposed to big-pimpin' niggativity, Jay-Z deploys the timeless sweetness of Al Green, Bobby Blue Bland, and David Ruffin to sugarcoat his own ultra-cynical worldview. The plea for social redemption in "Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)" gets flipped around into Jay-Z complaining about resentful haters: "where's the love?," he asks, as if it never occurred to him that rubbing your success in people's faces will rub 'em up the wrong way. Jay-Z's OG shtick involves the fact that he was wealthy through drug dealing before he became a rap star, and that "the rap game" is just a phase before even greater glories. "Put me anywhere on God's green earth/I triple my worth... I'm a hustler, baby/I sell water to a well". The sole chink in these delusions of invincibility comes with "Song Cry", an almost-apology to the girl he lost through fucking around. The title's clever concept is that the music (more symphonic soul) sheds the tears Jay-Z's too tough to weep.

Rap's mystery is that people pay to be entertained by what they'd normally flee: vivid death-threats, bores bragging about their income and sexual conquests. Clearly a deeply unpleasant fellow, Jay-Z is also mildly evil. How about the line "I'm still fuckin' with crime, 'cos crime pays" for socially destructive myth-mongering? Ultimately, though, resistance is futile. So give it up for the don of disrespect, the virtuoso of vanity, the king of conceit.

KANYE WEST
Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella)
Uncut, autumn 2005

by Simon Reynolds


Last year, Kanye West cut through rap’s standard-issue one-dimensional personae with some refreshing complexity. Neither “conscious” nor a bad-boy chasing bling and bitches, he was a little of both: a hungry soul (“Jesus Walks”) trapped in a body prey to venality (“All Falls Down”). Kanye can pull off the occasional highminded lyric without risking sanctimony, because he’s clearly the sort of preacher who gets caught with call-girls.

Late Registration’s core of mixed emotion clusters around four songs that deal with themes of worldly wealth versus gold-of-the-spirit. “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” starts where College Dropout finished (“Last Call”). It’s another paean to Roc-A-Fella, the label that signed West where other A&Rs scoffed at his deceptively sloppy flow. The giddy ascending chorus “forever ever ever EVER ever” pledges fealty to Jay-Z’s dynasty, which rescued him from the parlous times when “I couldn’t afford/A Ford Escort.” But when West chants “throw your diamonds in the air,” he’s not really showing off his new status symbols so much as his aesthetic riches, the genius-visionary’s “power to make a diamond with his bare hands.” The song lives up to this boast and then some. Nobody deploys vocal samples better than West, and here it’s Shirley Bassey’s “Diamonds Are Forever” that gets shook down for hidden hooks and latent meanings. The glittering production, laced with harpsichords and strings, matches the lines about “Vegas on acid/Seen through Yves St Laurent glasses”. But what about the title’s reference to “Sierra Leone”? That just got tacked on after the fact, to fit the video, an expose of child-slavery in African diamond mines, and has absolutely nowt to do with the lyrics!

It would have been cool if “Gold Digger” sampled “Goldfinger”. Instead, a Ray Charles loop powers this gritty groove, while (cute touch) Jamie Foxx kicks it off with a faux-blues whinge about a “triflin’ bitch” who sucks up his money and weed. West wryly observes “I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger/But she aint’ messin’ with no broke niggas!” “Addicted” offers a far fresher angle on exploitative heterosex. “Why everything that’s supposed to be bad/Make me feel so good?” ponders West, before launching into a rueful account of a mutually degrading affair that interwines sex and drugs. The admission “and I keep coming over” is shivered with a hiccup of pained ecstasy, hinting at the double meaning of “come”. The song’s exquisite arrangement lends poignancy to this tale of male weakness and shame: a glisten of Amnesiac guitar, filtered hi-hats, a sampled chanteuse crooning “you make me smile with my heart” (a line from “My Funny Valentine”). “Crack Music” disconcertingly equates the analgesic powers of drugs and music, with Kanye and The Game chanting the chorus--“That’s that crack music, nigga/That real black music, nigga”--over an impossibly crisp military beat. If Black Americans traffic in the best pain-killers around, the song implies, it’s because Black America has the most pain to kill.

It could be that Kanye West’s “honest confusion” anti-stance will become its own kind of shtick eventually. But judging by the mostly-brilliant Late Registration that won’t be happening for a while yet. He might even make it unscathed to the end of the quintology of conceptually-linked albums of which this album is merely instalment #2.

YING YANG TWINS
U.S.A. (United State of Atlanta)
Blender, late summer 2005

by Simon Reynolds

“Wait” is, no contest, 2005’s most striking single. The track’s radically emaciated structure--just that four-note sequence of 808 bass-thud, a few fingersnaps, and a faint rustle of hi-hat--eclipses even previous pinnacles of minimalism like the Neptunes-produced “Grindin’”. Yet many who dig the Ying Yang sound recoil from the words as mere sexual-harassment-with-a-beat. You don’t have to be prudish or PC to flinch at lines like “I’m gonna beat that pussy up”--less a would-be seducer’s come-on murmured into a lady’s delicate shell-like than the boast of a schoolyard bully about to go on a nerd-crushing rampage, surely?

If “Wait” pushes beyond your personal comfort zone, prepare to be outright traumatized by “Pull My Hair”, the stand-out track on the Ying Yang Twins’ fourth album. Built, like the bulk of U.S.A., by the Atlanta duo’s audio-svengali Mr. Collipark, the track is absolutely stunning, from its low growling bassline and spare snare-clicks to the eerie spatial placement of the vocals, whose sculptural vividness verges on psychedelic. What comes out of D-Roc and Kaine’s mouths ain’t pretty, though: “look, bitch/you’ve been talking a whole lotta shit/but wait ‘til you see my dick… your ass is in trouble… fuck you ‘til you crack”. Creepier still, the album implies that domination and degradation is what women “really want” by framing “Wait” and “Pull” with “Sex Therapy” skits, in which female callers tell a radio host how they like to be approached (“step up with swagger… and take control with me”) and what turns them on (“I can’t lie--I likes its rough”). Forming a triple-X trilogy with “Wait” and “Pull”, “Bedroom Boom” is more softcore, all caressing harpsichord ripples and baby-oil vocals from Avant. But clunker lines like “spread your legs like a bald eagle” show the Twins have got some ways to go before they truly master the Keith Sweat mode.

Just as you’re thinking that D-Roc and Kaine should go get lessons in love-making from Al Green, “Long Time” turns up, its gorgeous chorus borrowed from the Reverend’s “Belle.” Gospel-crunk featuring neo-soul singer Anthony Hamilton, the track is U.S.A.’s only song of devotion, but tellingly, the object of adoration here is masculine (the Almighty Lord). “My Brother’s Keeper” likewise reserves its tenderness for man-to-man relationships, wrapping the lyrics (about fraternal loyalty in the face of adversity) in a dreamy swirl of sound that recalls Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”. But U.S.A. does spare a scrap of empathy for Womankind on “Live Again”, an uncharacteristically compassionate portrait of a single mom stripper struggling to escape the clubs. Maroon 5’s Adam Levine (fresh from cameoing on Kanye’s new LP, he’s clearly the new Michael McDonald, the whiteboy rated “soulful” by African-Americans) croons sweet’n’sad about how the girl's existence is as confined as “a little box”. As these gestures toward depth and range suggest, Ying Yang Twins also chafe at the fetters of genre. But soon they’re back toiling at the crunk grindstone, rasping out song after song in praise of ass, thongs, and female compliance. It may not feed the soul, but it clearly pays the bills.