The Hip-Hop Generation Grabs a Guitar By TOURI

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

T'S near midnight at Joe's Pub in the East Village and the movement is in full effect. A roomful of twentyish and thirtyish black folk for whom hip-hop has been like a religion most of their lives are cheering as Mos Def, an esteemed rapper, roars through a set of hard rock songs, singing over the crunch of heavy guitars. He launches into a song called "Ghetto Rock." The chorus goes: "Yes, we are so ghetto! Yes, we are rock 'n' roll!" The song ends, and Mos says, "Y'all want some more rock 'n' roll?" The crowd screams for more. He tells them: "It's a whole movement, like Fela with Afrobeat. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. Noah, too."


There is indeed a movement under way. Rock has long been one of the sounds hip-hop used in its pastiche, but aside from groups like Outkast and GooDie Mob, who drench themselves in funked-out rock, it has consisted of a sampled riff here and there. Now the hip-hop generation is grabbing guitars and making rock 'n' roll.

"This is the sound of new America," said Martin Luther, a rising rock musician from San Francisco. "I'm coming to kill all the slave masters' memories! Hip-hop gave us that voice that allowed us to create who we were. Black rock 'n' roll is now a next something for those kids who've grown up, who still have that urban energy, but have experienced some pain to where they don't feel embarassed about showing some vulnerability." This new black rock movement has been around a few years, and its audience is small but growing. Though blacks created the rock 'n' roll and blues music that paved the way for whites to become early rock innovators, blacks have largely shunned rock both as fans and as players for decades.

In the 1960's Jimi Hendrix was dismissed by many blacks for playing what they called "white boy music." Today's black rockers see such obstacles as challenges they gladly accept. They are moved by the sonic aggression of hip-hop, its obsession with rhythm and the way it reflects, reports on and evokes the lifestyles of black people around the country. They are also turned off by the current state of hip-hop and R & B, with their limited subject matter and emotional options. Their sound is most often a deeply soul-inflected rock reminiscent of the mellower moments of Jimi Hendrix, Prince and Parliament Funkadelic rather than the full-on guitar assault of Fishbone or Living Colour. Much of this rock is difficult to distinguish from soul music, but the musicians use the word rock to distance themselves, they say, from the overly produced treacle that passes for modern soul. Rock, they say, gives them the freedom to express their own ideas. Santi White of Stiffed said: "There's a Smiths song that I love that says, `Hang the D.J. because the music he constantly plays says nothing to me about my life.' And that's how I felt. So I said, `Fine, I'm going to find some music that does say something about my life.' "

The undisputed aesthetic leader of the movement is an eccentric, 33-year-old, Atlanta-born Los Angeles resident named Cody Chestnutt. He wears a royal blue velvet hat with a large gold buckle that is a cross between a fedora and a stovepipe; answers the phone by saying "Praise the Lord"; and always carries his own drinking glass, a stout bowl-like cup with curved edges that looks like something out of the film "Beetlejuice." In October he will release his debut album, "The Headphone Masterpiece," a stunning collection of 36 mostly laid-back songs on which he sings and plays nearly every instrument. He recorded the album in his bedroom using $10,000 worth of equipment. Its lo-fi quality adds a homespun charm to what he calls "rock with a soulful edge," which recalls the Beatles, the Velvet Underground and the Strokes as well as Sly Stone, Prince and D'Angelo. Mr. Chestnutt said he was a drummer who wrote "the typical smoothed-out R & B" until he heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "I heard `Teen Spirit,' and I said that's what it's about," he said. "It's powerful, it's passionate, it's living and breathing right now. That song inspired me to pick up the guitar. And the guitar was the turning point." That was about seven years ago. Since then Mr. Chestnutt has not held a job, but, supported by his wife and friends, he has spent his time studying the guitar and searching for a sound that moved him. "I was blessed with having soul," he said, "but I went out to see what's going with the rock 'n' roll that I'm not familiar with. Hip-hop was not speaking to me. I didn't feel like I was learning anything. I was saying, how can I get the same soul that hip-hop has, but have an intellectual stimulation about it?" His first single, "Look Good in Leather," is a deceptively simple ditty that begins with him strumming an acoustic guitar and singing, "I can do anything I want because I look good in leather." What follows is four minutes of bodacious black male vanity and egotism of the sort often heard in hip-hop. It also extols a quintessentially American sartorial style and is thus a celebration of Americana. "That is the Fonz's theme song," Mr. Chestnutt said, referring to the character in the 1970's television show "Happy Days." "This is what `Happy Days' taught us. What defines cool? Black leather jacket and jeans." Such a song would not be possible in hip-hop because of its largely contentious relationship with America and Americanness. Even hip-hop's embrace of the American designer Tommy Hilfiger carries a certain ironic sneer. "Hip-hop brought the whole thing to the next level," Mr. Chestnutt said. "Now it's time to evolve into the future."

The 32-year-old Martin Luther is another major voice. His 1999 debut album, "The Calling," and its followup, "Funk Soul Rebel," to be released in the fall, evoke the rock-meets-swinging-funk of Bootsy Collins and Parliament-Funkadelic. Last year Res (pronounced Reese), a singer from Philadelphia, released "How I Do," a collection of seductive post-punk that recalled the Pretenders, with lyrics about self-empowerment that harked back to the roaring female singer-songwriters of the 70's. Most of her songs were written by Santi White, whose band Stiffed has toured with the seminal black punk-hardcore rock band Bad Brains and is releasing a seven-song EP this fall. A number of hip-hop luminaries are also moving into rock territory: the rapper Mos Def, who is starring in "Topdog/Underdog" on Broadway, has been performing and recording with his band Black Jack Johnson, which, filled out by members of Living Colour, Bad Brains and P-Funk, has a hard-edged rock sound reminiscent of Bad Brains or Fishbone. Kamaal, the silky-voiced rapper once known as Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, has recorded an unreleased album of rock-slash-soul on which he sings. And the top hip-hop producers the Neptunes, calling themselves N.E.R.D., recently released "In Search Of," a critically acclaimed album that features live instruments and singing. It's music that can be classified only as rock 'n' roll.

"I could do my thing over a hip-hop beat," Mr. Luther said, seeming to speak for the movement. "But when I do it my way, with these guitars and solos and breakdowns, you actually feel the gospel spirit from which I'm speaking, and the music talks to you in a different place."

Mr. Chestnutt said he was dismayed by rappers' and R & B singers' obsession with money, crime, sex, love and their own anger. "Music today doesn't inspire a dialogue," he said. "And if it does, the dialogue is quite hollow. What good does it do me and you to talk about how much you spent on jewelry? It doesn't edify."

Rock, he and the others maintain, allows a greater range of musical, lyrical and emotional expression. "In rock you could write a song about a dog and it makes sense," he said. On "The Headphone Masterpiece," Mr. Chestnutt offers songs about how nicotine and caffeine can make it hard to behave like a civilized human being, delivers a lullaby to a baby in which he tells the baby how lucky it is to not have to work and even mentions that he sometimes cries.

"Vulnerability doesn't work at all in hip-hop," Mr. Luther said. "You don't want to expose a weakness in that arena. Rock 'n' roll has no boundaries. You can talk about your dreams, fears, all kinds of things."

The new black rockers are closeknit: they play songs for each other over the phone and collaborate with one another in the studio. Most of them are friends.

"It's so important to have that," Ms. White said, "because you think you're crazy sometimes. Because everyone's like, `What are you doing?' And labels are like, `That won't sell.' And having the others is like having a mirror that talks back. They're saying what you're doing is dope. Then someone will call and say I'm going to quit music. And we're there for each other because you need somebody when you're doing something that a lot of people aren't doing, just to know that you're not lost."

But the barriers for the new black rock are high. Consider the the all-black hard-rock band Living Colour. With an endorsement from Mick Jagger and a 1988 hit single, "Cult of Personality," it gained prominence, touring with the Rolling Stones and reaching No. 6 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart. But three subsequent albums sold sluggishly, and in 1995 the quartet disbanded.

Its failure to make a lasting impact was partly because of its inability to reach an audience. Perhaps America was unprepared for blacks performing rock 'n' roll, or perhaps the recording industry was unsure of whether to play the group's music on urban radio and BET or on rock radio and MTV. And as unaccustomed as whites might have been to seeing blacks play guitars, blacks were unwilling to see rock as an acceptable form of self-expression for black musicians. To many blacks, rock was still "some old white mess."

The new black rockers have already been embraced by MTV: Res's video is played regularly, Mr. Chestnutt was featured on "MTV News" and the Neptunes are ubiquitous on the channel. Still, there's no reason to expect that the movement won't encounter the old stigmas.

"Black people in this country are told that they are just a few things," Kamaal said. "The minute that you start to wander and go outside of that you're not black."

Corey Glover, the lead singer of Living Colour, added to the thought: "There are some things you're not allowed to express as a black person. You got to be in your b-boy stance. You've got to wear the uniform. If you're out of the uniform, something's wrong with you. My whole life it's been like, `He's cool, he speaks the language, but something's wrong with that boy.' But the freak contingent in the house is bigger than you think it is."

Living Colour needed not simply to move the crowd, but also to get the crowd to accept the band's validity, and that demanded changing the perception of blackness for countless listeners, a burden that neither U2 nor Jay-Z ever had to shoulder.

The persistent message of hip-hop and R & B is that working-class life is the most relevant of black American experiences: "keep it real" is often code for validating one set of mores to the exclusion of all others. Expanding the nature of music means expanding the definition of what it means to be black in America. The new black rock movement has talent, ambition, guitars and minds it has to change.

"I would love for some little black kid to look at me and be like, `If she's doing it then I can do it and still be black,' " Ms. White said. "Black people limit ourselves. We're like, `Oh, if you do that you're not black.' But I'm black and I'm going to do anything I want to do. Then it'll be black because I did it."

I think this is the third post of this same topic.

and I just noticed that. Silly me.

hrm

I don't think rock has a color. I just know what I like.

If Rock has no color than how can people claim that certain people have stolen it from a certain group of people of color? Music as a whole is not owned by anyone. You cannot steal music that is not owned by anyone. Not possible. Music is Music is Music.

And why don't black folks support "Black Rockers"? When will that be explained? Lenny Kravitz has very few black fans. Jimi Hendrix had very few black fans. It seems Black folks only support rap or r and b singers. Nothing else. Even the legends of rock don't have a black following. Elvis didn't have a lot of black fans. Same with The beatles, The Stones. Bob Dylan, and on and on and on.

Spats said:

YEAH LIVE4LOVESEXY!!!

WHAT YOU THINKING!!!

NOT POSSIBLE!

HOW CAN ROCK HAVE NO COLOR!!!

SOME ROCK IS GRAY

SOME ROCK IS RED

SOME ROCK IS BLUE AND YOU PUT THEM ON RING

SOME ROCK IS GREEN AND KILL SUPERMAN

DUH

LIVE4LOVESEXY YOU SO SILLY!

besides for the music, image does count.

look at lenny kravitz, too depressing and boring.