How many black rock musicians can you name? Although rock and roll and all the genres that it begat were undoubtedly invented by black musicians (As Little Richard observed, "Rock & Roll is R&B uptempo! It’s R&B uptempo!!"), you can count the legendary black artists of rock music on one hand. Once you get out of the early days, when Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and converted soul men like Chubby Checker had hit after hit after hit, the pickings do get pretty thin as far as straight rock music is concerned. Jimi Hendrix is the exception that proves the rule. Remember: when Jimi first came up, he was marketed in Britain as a curiosity - the African Mau-Mau Guitar Man Straight From Darkest Africa With The Wildest Show On Earth! – not as a musician. Part of his enduring legend in the US is that he had the biggest penis the Plaster Casters ever saw. My thinly argued and tissue-thin thesis: no matter who invented rock music, rock music grew up anything but well-adjusted about race. If you disagree, perhaps you could tell me why nobody ever mythologizes about the size of Jim Morrison’s schlong.
Moreover, since Hendrix, black musicians in rock have remained so rare as to nearly be individually nameable. Is this a problem? Is it an issue? If so, does it result from latent prejudice or racism in the recording industry and American public, and can it be addressed? Or is it just one of those… things?
I only raise the question because Living Colour did first, and it got me to thinking. From their name down to their lyrics, Living Colour were a self-consciously political group, walking refutations of the notion that black musicians don’t (can’t?) play rock. (Whether this a notion in need of refutation in the first place was settled to the affirmative by Funkadelic. Look it up.) Their career was about racism in rock and outside, social justice, and addressing the inequities the group perceived in the mostly-white rock world and the world at large.
To aid in this, Living Colour members Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun started a group called the Black Rock Coalition, aiming to promote the careers of themselves and other black musicians working in rock through grassroots action. Unfortunately, the broader aims of both Living Colour and the BRC are mostly notable for their lack of enduring successes (Living Colour broke up after three albums and other members of the BRC never really broke big), and the brevity of the band’s career make it easy to forget how amazingly good they were. In the wake of Living Colour's recent reunion, Columbia Legacy has released from their vaults the live Living Colour Live at CBGB 1989 This is a good excuse to talk about what made them great, and to ask whether they were effective in getting their points across. (You can’t separate Living Colour’s politics from their music any more than you could with Phil Ochs, Fela Kuti, or Bruce Springsteen.)
The show captured on Live at CBGB was a sort of homecoming for the band. Their debut album, Vivid, had sold very well, they had had radio hits, and they were coming off an opening slot for the Rolling Stones. CBGB was where the band got their start, and they considered the legendary Bowery hellhole their home. Thanks to this, the group is captured here at their loosest and most relaxed. (When I saw them a few years later touring behind their third album, Stain, there was a minimum of stage patter and although they rocked savagely they weren’t really that much fun. The band broke up not long after.)
Living Colour were always bold, musically speaking. Guitarist Vernon Reid was a veteran of various free- and post-jazz units, and drummer Will Calhoun was a Berklee-trained musician with a penchant for furious swinging. With singer Corey Glover, whose pipes were among the best rock has seen, and bassist Muzz Skillings, the group could seemingly do anything – rock, metal, punk, jazz, funk, whatever. This boldness was on full display the night they recorded Live at CBGB. The band start off the night with their signature "Cult of Personality," and immediately follow it up with seven brand-new songs, including a cover of Bad Brains’ “Sailin’ On.” Who does that, play seven songs in a row the audience hasn’t heard?
Aside from a couple unreleased numbers that aren’t very strong (“Little Lies” and a by-the-numbers shuffle, “Soldier’s Blues”), Living Colour tear through their set with incredible energy and skill. The opening run-through of “Cult of Personality” sets the tone. Although not all that different from the (perfect) album version, Reid, Skillings and especially Calhoun stretch, compress, and flip the groove around at will, switching from double-time to wrongfooted half-time at the drop of a hat. Zappa fans will recognize this level of musicianship. Throughout, Vernon Reid unfurls jaw-dropping guitar lines at the drop of a hat and the Calhoun-Wimbish rhythm section create chewy, thick, heavy grooves that allow Reid and Corey Glover to orbit Saturn if they so desire.
Although the performance on disc is white hot, the band’s political side was at center stage that night. After all, Living Colour made message music. Even though it’s hard to name more than a couple Living Colour songs that aren’t explicity political to begin with, the set list from Live at CBGB trends heavily toward the militant, the angry, and the cutting. High points include “Pride,” Love Rears Up Its Ugly Head” and “Someone Like You” from their then--unrecorded second album Time’s Up,and “Cult of Personality,” “Funny Vibe” and a gorgeously deconstructed “Open Letter To A Landlord” from Vivid. Recurring themes of black pride, support for community structures, opposition to gentrification, and a preoccupation with The Man run through most of the songs here.
I’ve always been a fan of Living Colour, but having all their politics concentrated here in one place leaves a bad taste. How many songs about The Man can you stomach from a band whose operating principles amount to a bold “screw you; we’ll do it ourselves?” The group aspired to make complex arguments about ownership of history, the power structures hidden in society, and the need for intelligent and constructive resistance. However, as with a lot of political music, those arguments often turned into slogans.
This tendency is especially disappointing when the band often manage to actually make it work. Songs like “Middle Man” and “Funny Vibe,” not to mention “Cult of Personality” and the later “Auslander” cut deep. But others just don’t make it. The chorus to “Pride,” for example, goes
History’s a lie that they teach you in school / a fraudulent view of the golden rule / a peaceful land that was born civilized / was robbed of its riches, its freedom, its pride.
Whether Corey Glover is singing about Africa or the Americas, there’s a hard kernel of truth in there, but what is to be gained by harking back to a non-existent golden era of world peace and civilization? That’s not what happened either. I will grant that “I know what to do with someone like you” (from the song “Someone Like You”) sings better than “Police power must meet the needs of the community being policed, rather than acting as a paramilitary group exerting external force on that community; the latter is a recipe for riots, distrust, shot cops, and social breakdown, and that was my brother you shot last night” but the vague polemics in Living Colour’s lyrics too often undermine their very intentions – especially unfortunate when their targets were so big and important and their explicit agenda was so clear.
I realize I am setting myself up for attack on a number of fronts: he’s a racist; he’s a jerk; he’s willfully obtuse. I’m only picking on Living Colour because I like them so much. For all the endless rivers of words printed about the revolutionary potential of rock and roll, as an actual tool of revolution it’s pretty piss poor. With a few notable exceptions, like Neil Young’s heat-of-the-moment “Ohio,” rock does better when it’s accidentally political. (Take, for instance, the Beatles’ popularity in pre-Glasnost Russia, or Vaclav Havel’s idolization of The Mothers of Invention’s first few records in the dark days of the Iron Curtain). The Clash might rock like all hell, but their politics were pat and a pose besides. Rage Against The Machine suffer even worse if you look closely at their lyrics; do Americans really need guerilla radio? Or to rally ‘round the family with a pocket fulla shells? Getting teenagers to yell “&*#! you, I won’t do what you told me” is easy like falling off a log. And don’t get me started on Public Enemy or the Dead Kennedys.
But you know what? Forget all that. Living Colour’s performance on Live at CBGB will tear the head clean off your body. It’s hard rock, very good hard rock, and the lyrics are several orders of magnitude more thoughtful than Rage’s or Public Enemy’s, even if they don’t always make the grade as well-argued theses of dissent. Take my advice and check this disc out.
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