I don’t mourn dead musicians as deeply as some folks do. I never really knew them, after all, and I’ll always have their music. But losing Dave Jolicoeur—De La Soul’s Trugoy—at 54 hit me harder than any premature death since Adam Yauch kicked it at 47 back in 2012. Both guys are roughly my age, which has a lot to do with it—because I think I’m too young to die, obviously, but also because I grew up alongside them.
After Dave’s death, there was only one piece I could lead with this week. It’s not the full celebration of De La Soul’s career I might have written today, but a look at how a group who rearranged my brain as a college kid mattered to me just as much, but differently, at a later moment. 3 Feet High and Rising is a timeless life-changer, but De La’s Art Official Intelligence albums taught me how to persevere into adulthood, even if the group itself couldn’t keep on keepin’ on.
I wrote plenty about rap around the turn of the century. (More than some readers wanted me to.) Looking back on these pieces, I’m reminded that there’s no one more age-obsessed than a 30-year-old. I was ready to send Ice Cube, who’s seven months older than me, out to pasture, while cheering for De La’s “mid-life” resurgence. You see these things differently once you start to witness the death of an entire generation of rappers before they reach 60
3 Feet Underground: De La Soul’s Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump
City Pages, August 23. 2000
Whatever anyone told you, they were there to see the Biz. Sure, Pharoahe Monch and Talib Kweli had their respective partisans. The New School's Most Likely to Succeed, Chicago rapper Common, generated a groundswell of support as well. And on paper, July 4's all-ages Spitkickers show at First Avenue was dedicated to promoting De La Soul's forthcoming album, Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump (Tommy Boy). But whatever headliner provided our excuse to gather in the close, humidity-moistened huddle of the Mainroom, we'd come for one reason: to bask in the gelatinous glow of the tone-deaf lump of goodwill known as the Diabolical Biz Markie.
I myself needed a heavy dose of the Biz, as I was recovering from an even heavier dose of the bizness from the night before. The flawlessly vacuous professionalism of the Up in Smoke tour had rolled through the Target Center, and I was hung over from binging on the leftovers of hip-hop history. Eminem, the man of the moment, was shuffled off the stage before 9:00 p.m. to make way for his elders: poor, over-the-hill Ice Cube; and finally Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, who were introduced by a wack glocks-and-hoes video clip on the Jumbotron screen overhead. A bad move: When the duo walked out onstage, they shrank before our eyes, appearing smaller than life.
By the time we reached the dumbass NWA “reunion” finale, I felt like I'd stumbled into another damn Who tour, forced into the role of the Magic Mirror that reflects past glories upon aging stars worried they might not still be the dopest of them all. Then it occurred to me: What if an MC screams to throw your hands in the air, and you realize that you just don't care? No, I mean you really just don't care. Hip hop ain't in its teens anymore, and its concert conventions are beginning to calcify into clichés. I could have been at a Kiss show, the paying mass enveloping me could have been asked if we were “ready to rock,” and the swelling response would have felt just as rote.
Nostalgia is welling up in the underground, too. There's a palpable sense among newcomers that they've arrived too late and missed all the fun. Set the new Jurassic 5 disc against your old Flash records and you'll hear a self-conscious re-creation versus the spontaneous cheer of invention. This wistful sense undercut the Spitkickers show as well. Common's DJ threatened to”'take us back into time to see where this hip-hop shit came from,” and the MC himself appeared in a series of period costumes: fancy-threaded ’70s pimp, athletic-garbed b-boy, and so forth.
Even the spotlight placed on De La Soul seemed, at first glance, like another tribute to Back in the Day. The Long Island trio made the mistake of releasing a masterpiece on their first outing and, in its wake, spawned the cross-racial collegiate underground that shows like Spitkicker take for granted. Riding a herky-jerk beat that let its seams show, 1989's 3 Feet High and Rising sounded like a homey contrast to the masterful cacophony of Public Enemy or even the postmodern ease of the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. But as a serious hip-hop underground coalesced in De La's wake, tastemakers began to regiment the music's accepted styles—jazzy, minimalist, somber. In contrast, Posdnous, Trugoy, and Maseo produced an output that was too idiosyncratic and sporadic to always serve as the soundtrack to Hip Hop: The College Years.
All of De La Soul’s followup albums were dismissed by some as drop off; in hindsight, each has revealed itself as the classic others of us heard immediately. But that's just the point: You can't have hindsight until after the fact, and for a decade, De La Soul have been wedged between their need to tweak expectations and their fans' bent toward nostalgia. Which made their Spitkickers slot the ideal setting to counter the sentimental pull toward the past commonly accepted as history. After all, De La Soul had always kept a skeptical eye on hip-hop mythology. As Posdnous recently told The Onion, “With the golden age, there was as much negativity as positivity.”
You want to take it back to the golden age? Let's take it back then. Way back. Back to the late Eighties, that moment of promise that the hip-hop nation idolizes the way Rolling Stone does the late Sixties. The Vibe History of Hip Hop pinpoints “The Pinnacle” as 1988, the year both PE's It Takes a Nation of Millions... and Yo! MTV Raps dropped. On 1997's Stakes Is High, De La glanced back at 1987, asking old-school fans, “Where were you when you first heard Criminal Minded?” and creating a moving montage of voices recalling their first encounter with Boogie Down Productions.
Just as well that no one had asked 30-and-ups in the Mainroom that night where we were when we first heard 1989's 3 Feet High and Rising—how many variations of “In my dorm room” do you need to hear? Among De La’s many achievements was teaching sheltered white suburbanites an unspoken secret of race relations: Black kids could be just as dorky as we were. They had grown up on the same Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, sampled the same Steely Dan records we were ashamed to bring to college with us, and spoke in the same private language as any close-knit group of friends. For a solid two months, my friends and I rushed back from the dining hall every night and listened to the cassette in its entirety, deciphering its code and scrutinizing its liner notes.
Mosaic Thump is De La's blueprint for how to preserve your idiosyncrasies while maturing incrementally. Although De La are capable of intricate metaphorical flights, home truths are more their stock-in-trade. 'If 'if' was a spliff/Man we'd all be hi-i-i-i-i-gh/But it's not, so sober up,' says the MC who introduced himself to the world as Trugoy the Dove. Except now he has taken to calling himself “Dave.” Not MC Dave even. Just Dave. A comical move, maybe, but not a whimsical one. (Guess you just reach an age where you'd prefer not to be called by an inversion of your favorite food.)
Similarly, although the first offering from Mosaic Thump, “Ooh,” is as playful as your favorite moment in De La yore, few may hear it that way. This boisterous chant floats on a tinny Lalo Schifrin riff and is earmarked by gleefully discordant harmonies from Newark freelance troublemaker Redman. “Go ooh-ooh-ooh,” Red commands, whether you're “a fat chick gettin' your fuck on tonight” or “Wall Street niggas...up in the stands.” The track displays De La's new attitude, both earthier and more accessible.
That's right, accessible, as in “pop.” The Mosaic Thump groove is De La's most conventional to date, which says as much about how Timbaland and Swizz Beatz have diddled commercial conventions as it does about any tectonic shift in De La's aesthetic. “Your pop culture needs a diaper change,” Pos gripes, but De La seem aware that the underground can be more sonically conservative than the flossy moneymakers they despise. And so they craft an electrofunk that owes elements of its bounce to both Erick Sermon and whoever’s on the cover of Vibe this month. Afraid of contemporary R&B? Then duck for cover before the crooned hooks performed by suave manly types on “U Can Do (Life)” and the Chaka Khan guest spot on “All Good?” Even sampling the Lovin' Spoonful, which might have seemed an indication of their expansive musical tastes long ago, might come off as a predictable act of recycling in the post-Puffy era.
The most telling thing here might be the guest MCs on show. De La Soul accumulate misfits ranging from Tash of Tha Alkaholiks and Freddie Foxxx to a pair of Beastie Boys and the inevitable Busta Rhymes. The group has carved out a creative haven for all manner of crotchety but loving weirdos. It's a camaraderie of spirit that was on full display at First Avenue.
“Ya'll mind if I get nekkid?” Maseo asked us as their set sweated on into its second hour.
“If you do, Biz'll do it,” Pos egged him on.
True enough, after Mace proudly shed his blue polo shirt, baring his prodigious gut, Biz reappeared—shirtless, glistening, mammoth, gorgeous. Earlier, the Diabolical One had spun the theme from Cheers between sets, instigating a mass sing-along too unexpected to sound as corny as it might have. Now Biz displayed his true talent—his inability to sing—launching first into the dizzy “Vapors,” then his greatest hit, “Just a Friend.” With an atonal “Yooooooou, you got what I need…” he transformed himself into a living, bellowing manifestation of the freewheeling utopian impulse 3 Feet High and Rising once prophesied.
Mosaic Thump cherishes that impulse as well, but its makers realize it's not 1989 anymore. Generating an inclusive community based not on race, or skills, or cred, but on a willingness to put the most distinctive crannies of your personality on public display is only the first part of the plan. The next is to recognize that the past is no longer an anecdotal lump to be recycled for a cheap cheer; it's the roots of the present. On Mosaic Thump, nostalgia yields to a continuity of experimentation. Biz was the man we had all come to see. But De La Soul was the group that we needed to hear.
Independents’ Day: Public Enemy’s There’s a Poison Goin’ On, Soundbombing II, Quannum Spectrum
City Pages, August 11, 1999
Maybe there was a time when pure technique was the key to hip-hop supremacy, but if so that's as over as Moe Dee and Moet. Nowadays, you've got to have a concept, a mythology. The Wu's dubs-not-subs ghetto chopsocky, Biggie and Puff's high-rolling bougie boogie, or—going way back—Public Enemy's black-power moves.
Now, having jumped ship from Seagram-owned Def Jam (or been forced to walk the plank, depending on whom you believe), Public Enemy are left to surf the web for a new myth, and damn if Chuck D hasn't found one: “independent hip hop.’ True, he seizes this convenient mantle under the patronage of Al Teller, onetime CEO of MCA, current president of CBS Records, and founder of the net-based label of the future, Atomic Pop. After signing Ice-T last month, Teller released PE's seventh studio album, There's a Poison Goin' On, first on downloadable mp3, a week later on disc. With a demagogue's instinctive affinity for a new mouthpiece, Chuck now insists that the revolution will be digitally encoded. In this previously marginal medium, Poison takes on the music industry, preaching liberation theology to the jiggy flock currently in thrall to megacorporations.
Of course, long before Chuck vied with Al Gore for the title of Creator of the Internet, in that golden age known wistfully as “back in the day,” rap often circulated on a number of small independent labels. But then independence was a necessity, not a choice. Lacking the trust-funded privilege that allowed college rockers the freedom to eschew monopoly capital, most small-time hip-hop entrepreneurs kept their eyes on the major-label prize. The goal of a Russell Simmons or a Master P was always to attract corporate distribution dollars. Within the parameters of such a worldview, committing yourself to underground status would be like aspiring to become a Triple A shortstop.
But after two decades of buying into this system, a number of MCs and DJs have decided to opt out. Hip hop has begun to cobble together the sort of unpretentious back-scratching network that indie rockers now wax nostalgic over. It's a phenomenon that transcends the genre's deep-rooted geographical bias: Rather than wrangling over turf, groups like Minneapolis's own Rhymesayers Collective have established connections with similar subterranean hip-hop cooperatives in other cities. Type “independent” and “rap” into the search engine of your choice and get ready to wade through the results, each site insisting it's the locus of a movement, not just another fan page. Or catch tonight's XXL showcase at First Avenue, headlined by Chicago major leaguer Common with eight homegrown indie acts opening. This who's who event for the local underground was organized in part by Jon Jon Scott, one of a half-dozen local boosters launching his or her own transregional label this year.
Indie hip hop is suddenly not so underground anymore, and two recent high-profile label compilations, Soundbombing II from New York's Rawkus and Quannum Spectrum from California's Quannum, may prove to be time capsules of the emergent ethos. Still, like Public Enemy, both imprints remind us that independence is a relative state of being. You can emancipate yourself from mental slavery, but you've still got to keep on good terms with whoever signs your checks. Rawkus is the Gavin industry report's Independent Rap Label of the Year and unquestionably the prestige indie conglomerate of the moment; it's also owned by a white triumvirate whose most noteworthy member is 26-year-old James Murdoch, less familiar to the public than his dad Rupert (the owner of a little independent business called the News Corp.). After reporting $2.5 million in earnings last year, James has let Rawkus be assimilated into News America, a division of Murdoch-the-elder's company, and its website has recently been redesigned to link to the boutique-oriented site Platform.net. Angered faithful are already posting querulous chat-room messages insisting that Rawkus may be “not so underground as hell anymore.”
Deep pockets aside, what sets Rawkus apart from its rivals is that it creates an imagined community to which outsiders (consumers, artists) crave access. It ain't a party, after all, unless someone’s not invited. Dip into the multi-rapper party of Soundbombing II and you'll encounter a world as exclusive as Bad Boy's Cristal palaces, but where the entrance fee isn't a roll of Benjamins but a highly refined musical street sense. The album is hip hop's sonic equivalent to, say, the baptismal Lollapalooza, an “alternative” reorientation session where Mos Def is a household name and Common a big-deal celebrity (both drop by as guests). Perhaps the threat of being tagged a hater is too pervasive for inter-crew slags, or hip hop has finally learned that a dis is just a free advertisement for your adversary. In any case, after lead ringer Eminem threatens to “spray Puffy with Mase,” the remainder of the disc ignores the sort of high-profile playas Chuck rails against interminably on Poison.
Rawkus first burst into the subcultural consciousness with the crew Company Flow two years ago, when NYC's sound was nothing if not Puffy: Puffy murmuring over Biggie raps and Chic tracks; Puffy as mixed by Hot 97's Funkmaster Flex into Missy cuts and Wu Tang tunes. The hip-hop equivalent of lo fi, Company Flow's murky sound challenged hip hop's technocratic bias. The beats on their aptly titled Funcrusher Plus staggered, stumbled, and tripped up listeners. The whole exercise was, in fact, within a recognizable New York tradition of the stripped-down, tripped-out minimalism.
Now Soundbombing II insists that this low-key throb is what New York should sound like in 1999. Mixed by J-Rocc and Babu of the Beat Junkies, the disc is littered with high-profile cameos—Marley Marl, Pete Rock, Kid Capri, Prince Paul, and Q Tip. What's more, it sounds made-for-the-minute. If you take Pharaohe Monche's assassination/manhunt fantasy “Mayor” literally (“Sergeant yellin'/For me to come out like Ellen”), you'll be far jumpier than Rudy, who laughed it off in an interview. But it possesses a topical immediacy that makes hip hop and politics jell.
Though guest Mos Def warns against A&R enslavement, Soundbombing II contains no industry critique as pointed as the PE line, “If you don't own the masters/The masters own you,” (on the unfortunately titled “Swindler's Lust”). But maybe that's for the best. Up against the conversational currency of Soundbombing II, Chuck's lyrics sound like they were written in a vacuum, regurgitating the usual “unanswered questions”—not just “Who got Biggie and who shot Tupac?” but, Who are the “racist motherfuckers...shootin' at O.J.?” Somebody get Chuck's cable switched back on.
If Poison is blowhard and Soundbombing II bellicose, Quannum Spectrum is damn near oblivious to any world beyond its little acre of Bay Area underground. The Quannum label first emerged as an imprint called Solesides in the early Nineties from UC-Davis radio station KDVS, and its best-known proprietor is DJ Shadow (a.k.a. Josh Davis). But the chief proponent of the Quannum Collective's ideology is Lyrics Born from Latyrx, who spouts that “beautiful soul music” is “fuel to get us where we're going in our lives,” and whose rhymes seem culled from an ongoing pep talk he gives himself and his crew. Slurring like Jimmy Cagney on cess, LB brandishes the ingrown charisma of an underground celebrity. When he takes production credit, his trippy electrobeats are more eclectic and progressive than the hard electrofunk favored elsewhere on Spectrum by Shadow, who comes across as more strictly hip-hop than on his own beat collages.
Though Cali-spawned, Quannum may as well have emerged from nowhere--or everywhere. Spectrum sounds like the midnight hip-hop show at Everycollege, U.S.A., minus the dead air and fumbled attempts to fade out obscenities. The record floats in on a late-night radio murmur, narrated by Mack B-Dog, host of KDVS's The Late Night Hype. Populated by the kind of insomniacs who haunt low-frequency airwaves, Quannum Spectrum holds out the promise that membership is open to anyone with a telephone and an ill moniker.
Well, almost anyone. It comes as no surprise that both Soundbombing II and Spectrum are almost exclusively boys' clubs. Sure, the former album has Joyo crooning some tasteful Brand New Heavies-type silkiness, murmuring about “healing” and the “rhythm tree.” Bahamadia, who's cosmopolitan enough to have rapped for Roni Size, has her own shining cameo on “Chaos.” And aside from a fetal Eminem barking at his mom (“I'm ready now, bitch/Ain't you feelin' these kicks, cunt?”), there's no rampant gynephobia. But you've got to wonder if the boys aren't just worried about all that damn dancing they see on the MTV, or worried about Missy and Lauryn grabbing all the attention. Chuck D may not understand the new world of independent hip hop as thoroughly as he fronts, but when he defiantly barks, “This is man shit,” he knows whereof he speaks.
Del Phonics: Del the Funky Homosapien’s Both Sides of the Brain
City Pages, June 14, 2000
It ain't easy being famous when no one knows who you are. Ask those small-time hip-hop superstars nationwide, pouring boundless charisma into their hometown publicity vacuums, running wild in urban areas where any kid with half an active brain cell bands together with his like-minded peers. And damned if any of those potential celebrities can find an audience outside that same group. Some are still waiting for that big break, true. But some have already been broken. In the rap game, nice guys get finished first.
Known as the joker behind the oddball 1991 semi-hit “Mistadobalina,” if he's still known at all, Del the Funky Homosapien is the sort of musical weirdo the pop world mistakes for a one-hook wonder and the rest of us cherish as a reservoir of enlightening idiosyncrasies. A multiply pierced, bookish Oakland Hills video-game nut, and the baby cousin of Ice Cube, Del is not a hater, nor a teacher, nor a do-gooder. He's just a mouthy goof out to give logorrhea a good name. And though his first two records earned him almost as much in residuals as they did in rep, his erratic m.o. proved too weird for Elektra, the major that signed him at the urging of his brusque Compton relative. The label shelved Del's would-be third disc in 1996, necessitating the birth of Hieroglyphics Imperium, an underground business assembled with his crew, and the label imprint of Del's latest, Both Sides of the Brain.
The heat of the sudden spotlight and the chill of has-beenism have left many once-notorious MCs caustic and brittle. But that tempering has made Del more lyrically supple than when he was youthfully gabbing to the beat of his debut, I Wish My Brother George Was Here. Not that there's any shortage of free-floating enmity here. Del appoints himself “Style Police” early on, while “Pet Peeves” calls out “fair-weather associates,” and “Offspring” calls out wannabes. (Unfortunately, the latter track also takes advantage of the fact that “followers” rhymes with “dick swallowers.”) Still, Del is so flexible a stylist you don't realize how pissed off he is a good share of the time.
Similarly, Del's deadpan baritone enables him to tell a joke without outright mugging. Instead, his slightly spaced-out take provokes grinning empathy or even a head nod and a “true, true.” This delivery gently reminds us that we're all slightly weirder than we front. Even the crackhead “Soopa Feen,” a Pryor-worthy street caricature who wears a “Garfield and Odie beach towel for a cape,” is a figure more amusing than despicable or even piteous. Del's idea of a dis is “I'll boot you in the cerebellum and make your brain come out your nostrils”--pause–”Asshole.” And “Don't hate/Felicitate” would make one fine bumper sticker for your hooptie.
Not that Del has a hooptie, or even a valid Cali driver's license, a fact that lends potential political import to the giddily snotty “If You Must,” a public-health lecture about how “It's important to practice good hygiene.” The indelible hook: “You gotta wash your ay-uss...Or else you'll be funky.” (For those of us who patronize mass transit, after all, odor is a social concern, not a matter of private preference.) And that's just one example of Del's commitment to the everyday. A fan of Slick Rick's narrative acuity, Del ensures that each rap treads a relatively linear path from A to B. There's no post-Wu obscurity here, just the world outside filtered through one man's ever-shifting consciousness. Maybe you've got to be more of a gamer than I am to decipher the video-game debate “Proto Culture,” but its slam on Blockbuster (rhymes with “lackluster”) is clear enough.
All of which would be merely endearing if the music, mostly self-produced, didn't retool the shoplifted Oaktown P-Funkery of his debut into forward-looking electrohop. This style is easily distinguishable from both Bay Area rappers who “wish the Eighties was back,” as he scoffs, and right-coast beat puritans. In an underground that errs on the side of austerity, Del's tracks explode with a generous surplus of caprice, founded on the aesthetics of whim. The result is a sound that stands in contrast to the work of countless undergroundlings who believe less—less ornament, less exposure, less money, less trouble—is best.
“I can't fall in this rap game,” Del protests on Both Sides of the Brain. “I got acrophobia.” Maybe that's not a boast, though. Maybe he's afraid of scaling the heights that could set him up as a target for backlash. With some of Del's best stuff available only via website (the Elektra-squelched Future Development for example), the limited cult appeal he prizes may well be his fate. That'd be a shame. Such marginalization is a snugger fit for the Robyn Hitchcocks and Kool Keiths of the world—willful oddballs who appeal to some fan's fluke of taste—than for the gregarious Del. In a just marketplace, Both Sides of the Brain, which is already drawing tentative mainstream attention, would deliver Del from the semi-obscurity he so prizes.
In any case, the Hiero Imperium crew's self-sufficiency in the face of corporate Malthusianism is a promising trend. Right now, by a happy fluke of culture and economics, the mass hip-hop audience needs Del's imagination more than Del needs their cash, and the underground needs his iconoclasm more than he needs their cred. It's time for hip hop to recognize the weirdos in its midst. So dedicate Both Sides of the Brain to those whom guest MC El-P (from Company Flow) toasts on “Offspring” as “the misplaced famous.” Whoever they are today. The spotlight keeps moving, flickering, fading. Now you see 'em…
Coup De Grâce - The Coup's Party Music
November 14, 2001
The sort of people who work in financial markets are not merely symbols but also practitioners of liberty. They do not suffer constraints on their private ambitions, and they work hard, if unintentionally, to free others from constraints....[T]he terrorists that crashed half their arsenal into the World Trade Center...believed that the bond traders are as critical as the U.S. generals and the politicians to extending liberty's influence in the world. They may be right. And that should make you feel proud.
--Michael Lewis, “Why You?,” New York Times Magazine, September 23, 2001
Just when you thought the canonization of the stock analyst had gone out of style like Rubik's Cubes and leg warmers, new-economy cheerleader Michael Lewis offers up his dazzling image of the heroic bond trader. We should praise him, Lewis urges, as he drips his emancipatory juices upon the lower classes from on high. Like Lewis, many pundits in the wake of September 11 seemed enthusiastic to equate the Bill of Rights with the W.T.O. bylaws. “Our enemies,” the line of argument goes, merely resent the extension of “liberty's influence,” as represented by the global economy. Suddenly, the implication was that bloody, anti-modernist fundamentalism and a reasonable desire to regulate “free trade” had become synonymous.
And, to complicate matters, there was Oakland hip-hop duo the Coup.
In case you haven't heard, the original cover art for the Coup's Party Music (75 Ark) was a Pen & Pixel of group members Boots Riley and Pam the Funkstress detonating the World Trade Center. Intervening events made this image impolitic. An over-the-top image that must have seemed like a radical-chic critique of capitalist exploitation last summer now seemed neither chic nor rad. (The album, released November 6, now shows an elegant Molotov cocktail served up in a martini glass.) And so, a sober critic must now attest, when you're grooving to a track like Party Music's “5 Million Ways To Kill a CEO,” maybe you should pause to consider the families of those dead execs.
I said maybe. First, let me state the obvious: If just the 5,000 highest-ranking corporate officials in the world had been murdered in the World Trade Center attack, yes, it would still have been a profoundly horrifying event. But let me state the less obvious: The Coup tune is about luring greedy suits to the demise they themselves create. “Tell him boogers be selling like crack,” Riley suggests of one boardroom criminal. “He gon' put the little baggies in his nose and suffocate like that.” Finally, let me state the obvious and yet apparently unstatable: Even in a time of war, corporate capitalism is not beyond reproach.
Throughout Party Music, Riley shores up the notion that poor people have a right to feel rage toward rich people. “Every broke muthafucka finna form a gang, and when we come we takin' everythang,” he declares, while acknowledging that the poorest are sometimes the hardest to convince of that right.
But despite the sweeping thrill of what he describes as a “Ghetto Manifesto,” Riley's political analysis is most persuasive when it's rooted in the complications of the everyday. In “Nowalaters” he reminisces convincingly about a teenage fling ('Put down the Olde E and turn up the Howard Hewitt”) and the pregnancy that supposedly resulted from it. When he turns out not to be the father, he waxes compassionate about teen moms rather than lashing out. Riley's finest empathetic moment is “Wear Clean Draws,” a collection of practical yet radical advice to his young daughter. Even didactic historical analysis like “Tell your teacher I say princesses are evil/The way they got their money is they killed people'” sounds adorable in this context.
The Coup’s militant funk offers a political clarity and generosity as eloquent as any excerpt from Riley's analysis, with low-riding bass sinking melodically beneath high-end keyboards that whistle and screech. The most immediate hip-hop assault since the heyday of the Bomb Squad, Party Music demands to be heard.
And so does Riley. In an interview with San Francisco radio personality and activist Davey D last month, Riley said that he wishes 75 Ark had kept the WTC cover. Not because he advocated that sort of violence, but because the continued controversy would have attracted more attention and allowed him to present alternative points of view to a wider audience. Maybe he's got a point: You'd probably never heard of the Oakland hip-hop duo before this. A decade ago, back when hip hop seemed like the last bastion of free speech, Michael Franti was willing to tell his audience that hypocrisy—or being able to mouth off without consequences—is the greatest luxury. Who's going to take up the debate now?
Sadly, the events of September 11 have proved more likely to shut down debate than promote it. Since that interview with Riley (and, perhaps, partly as a result of it), Davey D has been fired from his public-affairs position at KMEL-FM, a station owned by national radio monolith Clear Channel. Corporate interests suspect that those of you who raise unpleasant truths may be even more critical to extending liberty's influence than McDonald's or Exxon. They may be right. And that should make you feel proud