Mark Montgomery French

The Negro Problem: Joys & Concerns (1999)

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The kids call it “Afro-Baroque”.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: In 1969 soul singer and organ player Billy Preston performed with The Beatles during their “Let It Be” sessions. Had they decided to compose songs together they might have sounded like The Negro Problem. Los Angeles-based Mark “Stew” Stewart has spent the last decade crafting disarmingly clever pop songs that make The Negro Problem sound like a lost band from the 1960s, the 1980s and at times, the 1930s.

Using irony the way Public Enemy uses a sampler, Stew bends your ear and his point of view into a pretzel of detachment and empathy. “Repulsion” celebrates the hangover of groupie love, and dares us to “call in late for work on Monday”. The shallow meets the surreal in two versions of “Comikbuchland”, one stately and grand, the other fizzy like a handful of Pop Rocks.

These songs are fun to sing with – I dare you not to croon along to the “doo-doo doo-doo” cabaret chorus of “Heads”, or the “ba-ba-baa” that begins mechanical surrealism of “Peter Jennings”. Instrumentally swarming with organs, flutes and mellotrons, each song is as catchy as a Broadway tune, but deviously darker and generally more enigmatic.

Their goofier side is brazenly evident in “Ken” a first-person monologue about Barbie’s boyfriend, where he admits the rumors are true:

My name is Ken
And I like men
But the people at Mattel
The home that I call hell
are somewhat bothered by my queer proclivities
It’s safe to say that they are really pissed at me

They always stick me
with Barbie
But I want them to know
I prefer GI Joe
But any able bodied man-doll will surely do
Just someone to love, since I am not set up to screw

Some bands’ music are designed for dancing, or drinking, or moping. The Negro Problem’s music would be good with fried ice cream, another unbelievably rare, sweet and crunchy delicacy.

THE FALLOUT: Fantastic critical acclaim but little sales. Stew started his solo career at this point (with collaborator Heidi Rosewald) and all but tabled The Negro Problem.

Joys & Concerns is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:

A joyful odyssey into frequently odd human failings, Joys & Concerns floats upon its own bubble of pop.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Miles Davis gets so funky his label refuses to release his album for 25 years.

Vacation!!!

Hi there, one of my thousands of readers. After eighteen straight weeks of bringing you the finest in unsung Black departure albums I’m taking the week off. Feel free to peruse the previous entries at your leisure. The most popular review so far has been Q-Tip’s Kamaal the Abstract perhaps because it contains audio files to his unreleased album. What do you think? A brilliant masterwork or a cry for help?

See you next Wednesday.

Stevie Wonder: Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (1979)

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Twenty-five years later and his career still hasn’t bounced back.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: It’s 1979 and my mom is amped. We’ve just come home from the record store where we picked up Stevie Wonder’s first album in three years! Mom had practically worn the grooves off his last album, the double-length Songs in the Key of Life, and this one is a double record too! It’s gonna be great!

Then Mom puts the needle on the first song. She planned to sing along with Stevie but she is freaking out over the numerous instrumentals (starting with the synthetically orchestral “Earth’s Creation”) and songs in foreign languages (Japanese in the kids-and-koto-led “Ai No, Sono”, and Bambara in the savannah rhythms of “Kesse Ye Lolo De Ye”). She wanted to get down with some high-energy funk but instead she’s hearing mid-tempo ballads (the gorgeous “Black Orchid”) and slow hymns (like the funereal organs of “Ecclesiastes”).

Mom screws up her face at the record player as if it had defecated on the carpet. She furiously examines the record sleeve for some explanation of this madness, as if some random backup singer’s name would somehow justify this thing she had just purchased, at double record price no less.

“It’s a soundtrack to a plant documentary”, she snarls, as if that clarifies everything. “Why? Why would he do this?” Meaning, why would he do this to us, all the Black people who have supported him throughout his entire career, why would he blindside us with an un-funky, un-political, un-lyrical and un-cheap score to an un-movie?

The simple answer is, because the filmmakers asked him and he said “yes.” The real answer is devastatingly more complex.

America grew up with Stevie Wonder. We listened to him sing his little heart out as a young boy on Motown. We watched him take control of his career and turn synthesizers into seductive funk instruments. We heard him mature into the one of the best living songwriters, somehow selling millions of records and having dozens of hit songs while maintaining complete respect from other artists, musicians and critics.

But after a seventeen-year career of doing the same sort of music over and over, an original score offered him a chance to expand his talents into a completely new realm of composition. Based on the book by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the documentary The Secret Life of Plants posits the thought that plants can actually feel emotions and are more sentient than anyone had ever considered. At a time in history where no one thought that a blind Black man had any more to offer the world than basket-making, I see how Stevie might have jumped at this opportunity.

Alas, the modes and tones that make up a great score are usually not the ones that make up a toe-tapping pop album. There are some classic Wonder moments on the album, namely the live band throwdown of “A Seed’s A Star” and the liquid vocoder disco of “Race Babbling”, but it’s mainly a collection of intriguing and expansive background music.

Had it been promoted as the score it truly was, the stage would have been set for a proper audience response. But it was set up as the next release from the man whose last three albums won Album of the Year Grammys, back-to-back-to-back, and the world expected something…, well at least something with a lot more words in it.

THE FALLOUT: Dead on arrival. The critical and commercial backlash was so intense I bet he wished he was deaf too. The up-with-romance single “Send One Your Love” was a minor hit but that was it. Even the film got caught in the horror, barely screening at all, ever.

Motown begged him to record a back-to-basics album lickety-split and he returned the next year with the successful Hotter Than July. The reggae of “Master Blaster (Jammin’)” probably saved his career, and yet, it killed his artistry. From 1980 on, Stevie Wonder released far fewer albums and all but gave up taking musical chances. The last twenty-five years of Stevie Wonder has been an abrupt shift from new sounds and naked expressiveness into flabby, overwrought sugar treats, and it all ended with this album.

Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants is available at Amazon and you can listen to some tracks below:

Expensive and unique, progressive and forgotten, Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants deserves a rebirth. I mean really, it’s WAY better than In Square Circle, and some of you actually bought that one. Ah well.

NEXT WEEK: Los Angeles has a Problem with Negroes.

Chocolate Genius: Godmusic (2001)

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Alter-ego tripping.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: All over the world, for as long as human have performed, masks have been used to shelter identities while speaking truths, no matter how base those truths may be. New York musician Marc Anthony Thompson released two pop-soul albums under his own name in the 1980s but unleashed his sacred and profane persona Chocolate Genius in the late ‘90s. Witty and urbane, naïve and spastic his second album Godmusic demands your respect without requiring your approval.

His burnished, hushed baritone draws you in like a confessional then traps you there like a fly in a web, each song slowly progressing as if gravity is its enemy. On first listen the tunes seem ordinary, familiar, but each playback reveals additional layers.

The hymnlike moods are caressed into creation, from the mournful barbershop quartet of “Infidel Blues” or the ambient piano accents of the womb-like “Love”:

Love, love, love/ Poets talk
Love, love, love/ They don’t know
Love, love, love/ Stupid motherfuckers

Lyrically searching for happiness in a bleak world, he evokes a new dawn rising in the shimmering “Bossman Piss (In My Lemonade)” and literally creates God music with the ringing and squealing “To Serve You”.

“Planet Rock” is not a cover of the Afrika Bambaataa classic but a wheezy and cheesy eulogy to a lost friend, its synthetic candy-ass tones as cheap as the drugs she took:

I know a girl from planet rock
who swears that she can stop?
I heard her scream without a sound
burn her father’s house to the ground
I told myself I wouldn’t waste a song
Because she’s gone.

This may the only album I’ve heard that tries to be as wry as possible.

THE FALLOUT: Unclassifiable, unexplainable and essentially unsellable, Godmusic attracted a fistful of great reviews and a thimbleful of sales. In a typical story for this site, Chocolate Genius recorded his next album for another label.

Godmusic is out of print but used copies can be found at Amazon, and you can hear tracks right here:

Starting with out-of-sync warbling and ending with a nod to Truman Capote, Godmusic is refreshingly intelligent, humorous and oddball.

NEXT WEEK: Stevie Wonder scores a little plant documentary and, oh it backfires.

Neneh Cherry: Man (1996)

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As in “Man, what ever happened to her?”

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Neneh Cherry’s unification of hip-hop and energetic pop music made her an international superstar with the release of 1991’s Raw Like Sushi, but her toned-down followup, 1993’s Homebrew, was an artistic advance yet a commercial retreat. And if you’re American, that was probably the last time you heard from her.

The rest of the world, however, was privileged to receive Man in 1996, a honey-coated slab of soulful electronica. Co-written and produced by her husband Cameron McVey, it sparkles with intellect and sensuality while decimating you with hard beats and grunge guitar.

The buttery smooth strings of “Woman” move like honey just before it drips out of the container, full of sweetness and anticipation, while Cherry reaffirms her mission statement:

You gotta be fortunate
You gotta be lucky now
I was just sitting here
Thinking good and bad
But I’m the kinda woman
That was built to last
They tried erasing me
But they couldn’t wipe out my past

“Hornbeam” sizzles with confidence, sailing in a sea of wordless cooing and strangled electronics, filled with the joy of pure sensual emotion, building and building, like a cocoon before it bursts.

Man does contain a massive international hit single in the Youssou N’Dour duet “7 Seconds”, its steely cool impassiveness starkly contrasts against the warmth of their voices.

Cherry shows off the swagger in her step in the trip-rock of “Kootchi”: a laundry list of the mundane things she likes about her lover:

I love the way you walk,
I love the way you talk
With your mouthful
The way you park on the sidewalk
The way you are in the car
I’ll make you love the way I behave
On my bad days

Belting this while a meteor shower of distortion rains over a military backbeat, her ability to sound demanding and vulnerable simultaneously is uncanny. Her vocal command travels down to the quiet alien calm of” Carry Me” and up to the bouncy sandpapery beat of “Together Now”. All the makings of hit record in America.

THE FALLOUT: Alas, her American record company was going through a “restructuring” in 1996 and declined to release Man, ever. It was a minor hit in the rest of the world, lovingly out of step with current music trends. Outside of guesting on other artists’ singles, Neneh Cherry has yet to record a follow-up album in the nine years since its release.

Man is available at Amazon and you can also listen to tracks here:

A rare humanistic electronica album, Man is worthy of seeking out, even if you live in the USA.

NEXT WEEK: Chocolate Genius turns to God, kinda.

Divine Styler: Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light (1992)

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Are you ready for the love of Allah, ambience and acid?

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: What was Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate smoking in 1992? Ice started singing with the hardcore punkish Body Count, Everlast turned into the Irish Cypress Hill with House of Pain, and Divine Styler fell into the abyss with the scary-ass freakshow of Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light.

Ever hear a song and think “This is just wrong. Songs aren’t supposed to go like that. Is something in my ear?” This is a whole album of those songs, each one more disturbing and psychically damaged than the last one.

Dropping the strict hip-hop of his previous album, 1989’s Word Power, Spiral delves into psychedelic speed metal, trip-hop, Elizabethan acoustic fingerpicking and jam-band blues rock while unveiling fiendishly intricate rhymes about his Muslim faith and psychedelic drugs. What he doesn’t do exactly is rap, although every other method of vocalizing is present and accounted for.

In “Am I An Epigram for Life” he asks himself muffled metaphysical questions while swirling down the drain of keyboard bloops. The bloops return in “Touch” where he whispers his beat poetry up against a melting CasioTone preset beat, which then decays into a funk march.

It’s unsettling to listen to “Love, Lies and Lifetime Cries” as it consists mostly of him pleading “They won’t let me in!” while he frantically knocks on a closed door. I wouldn’t open it either; he doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to let in the house. But his paranoid ranting over sickly oozing keyboards is highly intriguing.

“Grey Matter” was the radio single, as if wooden flute techno jazz was going to get him spot on “Yo! MTV Raps”. His eloquence is outstanding as it is avant-garde, as he goes way out onto the microledge with “Heaven Don’t Want Me And Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over. He pontificates, seduces and conjoles you with his oratory skills, one step from outright screaming. He saves that for “Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea” a buzzy slab of industrial grindcore.

Divine Styler kicks it super-old school, kinda, with the drums-and-space of “Euphoric Rangers” then stays in outer space with “Aura” where he raps over the sounds of a malfunctioning alien probe ship.

THE FALLOUT: Divine Styler impressively wrote, produced, arranged and played most of the instruments on Spiral, but his fearlessness caught hip-hop heads completely off-guard and it bombed. Divine Styler lost his production deal, his record label and eventually his freedom (if not also his tether to the material world).

Spiral is out of print but might be available from Amazon. You can also listen to tracks below:

Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light is unabashedly psychotic but worth the effort of a complete listen.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: What ever happened to Neneh Cherry?

Little Axe: The Wolf That House Built (1994)

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The first ambient dub blues album. Sorry, Moby.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Little Axe is the nom de plume of guitarist Skip McDonald (which itself is the nom de plume of…OK I’m digressing.) He’s most famous for being the in the Sugarhill Records house band (remember “Rappers’ Delight”?), the group which eventually mutated into the sample-happy urban rockers Tackhead.

But McDonald was a bluesman at heart and in 1994 he refocused his talents to bring Delta blues into the next century with the exceptional The Wolf That House Built. Working with his Tackhead partners, McDonald wraps his taut guitar around canyon- deep bass lines, East Indian tabla drumming and atmospheric splashes of electronica to create tunes that transcend culture and time period.

The Wolf of the title refers to the classic blues man Howlin’ Wolf, who’s sampled vocals take the lead of the modern hobo song “Ride On”. Greasy and gritty, it mimics the traveling gait of a subway train strutting through the town.

The chain gang voices of “Never Turn Back” add a primordial sadness to the tabla dervish, its percussiveness chips into the song like tiny icicles. You can almost see the animals conjured from the opium smoke.

The music’s refusal to specify its genre is it’s greatest conceit. “Wake The Town” might be a traditional Pakistani wailing song until it takes a detour into Jamaican dub. Both “Out In The Rain And Cold” and “The Time Has Come” laces its American blues idioms with video game percussion; the sort of music one would hear from the bar band in a futuristic anime.

With all the heavy tech used on this album the real surprise here is the sunny “Another Sinful Day”. Consisting of just voice and jangly guitars it summons up the simple joy of making music around the campfire, which is about as rootsy as blues can get.

THE FALLOUT: Rootsy of not, Wolf flopped upon release and Little Axe found himself a new label. Five years later Moby used the same combination of transplanted blues vocals and electronics on his album Play, which became a multi-million-selling international hit album. Ah, timing is everything.

Wolf is way out of print but you can score a copy at Amazon, and you can hear tracks below:

The Wolf That House Built is a sterling example of world music done right, and its inventive exuberance is timeless.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Divine Styler loses his mind and records it for our enjoyment.

Sun Ra: The Magic City (1965)

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A nice place to visit on your way to Saturn.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Having recorded over one hundred albums in a forty year span, many of them self-released only at his concerts, Sun Ra’s entire canon defines obscure. As a turban-and-robe-wearing, Egyptology-loving outer space enthusiast, his oddball status within jazz circles kept many music fans from taking him or his music seriously. Claiming a birthplace of Saturn, he nevertheless drew attached to his adopted hometown of Birmingham, Alabama and in 1965 he recorded an homage to it entitled The Magic City.

Ra and his band the Arkestra were highly skilled swing musicians, which may explain why their transition into free jazz remains listenable. The title track, nearly half an hour in length, has a dozen movements that could serve as a miniature Sun Ra biography. It begins with a spooky buzzing that’s reminiscent of 1950s alien arrival films. A lattice of stratospheric flutes simulate the wonderment of a new civilization. One can also visualize the growth of modern industry, the vertigo of skyscrapers, the joy of walking your pet in the park, and the madness of traffic jams, all within the rising and falling of the instrumental moods.

“The Shadow World” is a night full of travel where the city never sleeps. Drums pop like oil in a skillet, horns circle like birds around a building. “The Abstract Eye”, appearing in two takes, features wonderfully expressive bowed bass that sounds not unlike the opening and closing of twenty-foot zippers.

THE FALLOUT: Barely known outside of hardcore jazz fans, The Magic City sold poorly, although massive sales were not the point of Sun Ra’s musical experiments at all. Still, many of his contemporaries borrowed his ideas, both musically (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Funkadelic) and presentationally (Earth, Wind & Fire), and received fat accolades while Ra remained a fringe artist nearly until his death in 1993.

Ironically for such an historically hard-to-find album, The Magic City is now available worldwide from such retailers as Amazon, and you can hear tracks below:

A landmark of improvisational music, The Magic City helped redirect the limits of modern composition and still sounds contemporary, forty years after its recording.

NEXT WEEK: Tackhead reformulates and gets the Axe.

Fishbone: The Reality Of My Surroundings (1991)

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A band at its peak is a marvelous thing.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: In the 1980s Los Angeles fixtures Fishbone were one of the first ska-influenced bands to net a major-label deal, yet creative control was not a part of their contract. Producer David Kahne buffed and honed their more commercial songs to a pristine polish, which was a major shift from their ruggedly eccentric live material. After three years of negotiation they convinced their label that they could self-produce, resulting in 1991’s psychedelically stunning The Reality of My Surroundings.

Normally a seven-piece band, Fishbone strived for audio maximilism, cramming most songs with orchestra-level layers of Technicolor instrumentation and agressive melodicism. They sounded like a band suddenly freed from oppression, and the theme of surviving through hard times flavors every track.

“Fight The Youth” explodes with curlicues of metallic guitar set to “stun”. Instruments slash and thrust like an open pack of switchblades, daring you to approach them. This isn’t the sunny funny goofy group from 1988’s Truth And Soul. This Fishbone is politically aware and incredibly pissed off.

The inner-city fury of “So Many Millions” slams you like a newbie in a prison riot. Skittery drums anchor funky swells of sound, as if danger is rising up behind you. Gangs of vocals moan over insistent guitar solos and the song doesn’t stop as much as it passes out from all its expended energy.

The indentured servitude anthem “Housework” conjures up a mythical 1920s New Orleans juke joint, full of tinkly piano and muffled horns. Yet its continual beat changing — from old-jack swing to new-time waltz — keeps it in the now.

Control and the loss thereof haunt both the sadly melancholic “Those Days Are Gone” and the radioactive carnival ride of “Behavior Control Technician”:

Children runaway from the torturistic ways
Children still resist from the powers that persist
Will you shut up and sit still
I think you should obey
Having very few rights we cannot communicate

Train my brain to work the way you want me to
Don’t question authority see
Be a little zombie that agrees with you
You are strapped with a double standard cup
In a battle you won’t win
And when it’s over we’re gonna dance your memory away

Sheltering will restrict your baby’s mind

Over nothing but African drums, “Junkies Prayer” recites a different cracked-out poem in each ear while a gritty sample of a cheesy laugh track floats in and out of the mix. It’s both humorous and devastating, as is the entire album.

THE FALLOUT: The kinetic first single “Sunless Saturday” helped propel Reality to become Fishbone’s highest charting, largest selling and most critically beloved album. But all success is relative, and after fourteen years it has yet to reach gold status. One album later Fishbone was dropped by their label and lost half of their original members.

Reality is available at Amazon and you can listen to tracks here:

An artistic tour de force, The Reality of My Surroundings’ intense and well-crafted performances deserves a better fate than what it received.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Sun Ra, the original Black departure artist, shows us the “Magic”.

Basehead: Play With Toys (1991)

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Messages in a bottle, of malt liquor.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Ever have one of those perpetually tipsy college friends who’s deepest, most fully formed relationship is with beer? In 1991 Washington D.C.’s Michael Ivey, inspired by failed romances and the beers that accompany them, cranked out the album that would eventually make several “best album of year” lists and help solidify two different record labels: Play with Toys.

Ivey cut his intimate slacker hip-hop songs nearly alone on his bedrooms’ four-track recorder, mostly sparse guitar vamps over head-nodding drum breaks, and this low-fidelity touch makes his songs very endearing. He also is quite funny, in a Cheech and Chong sort of way, and his slurry low-volume singing voice draws you into his beer-goggle universe of loss, confusion and apologies.

In the droning funk of “2000 BC” he pines for the missing brain cells he’s lost through drinking, yet he sings a love song to his brew in “Ode to My Favorite Beer”, complete with old-school needle drops from Eazy-E’s “8-Ball”.

His friends show up in many of the songs, acting as a Greek chorus by commenting on the tunes during their performance, sometimes interrupting the song to the point of stoppage. “Brand New Day” follows his post-breakup emotional state, as he pauses the song several times to change his view on how sad or relieved he is to not be with his girlfriend. Then it stops again to listen to some nice breakbeats.

He gets even more emotional in “Not Over You”, getting drunker and more hostile as the song progresses:

So judge me true
by what I say, not what I do.
Why do folks continue to say
that I’m not over you?

The song eventually comes to a halt so his friend can find another song on the radio to calm him down. You can advance to the next track to see how well that worked out.

As if the fourth-wall shattering meta-commentary isn’t surreal enough, the entire album is presented as a band performance in a country and western bar. Yes.

THE FALLOUT: Released by the fledging indie label Émigré and re-released the following year by the fledging mini-major label Imago, Play With Toys was critically acclaimed for its focused eccentricity and twisted humor, yet never sold well. Basehead put out three more albums but hasn’t made a public note since 2001.

Play With Toys is out of print worldwide, but you can pick a used copy from Amazon and you can hear selected tracks below.

Provocative and ridiculous, Play With Toys sneaks up on you with delight, like the pint before last call.

See you next Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Fishbone fights for a taste of “Reality”.