Black rock

Mos Def, Everlast, OutKast, and the future

By Jon Caramanica

A GREAT UNFULFILLED CONCEPT: despite Mos Def’s fire-and-brimstone delivery, Jack Johnson isn’t likely to have any impact on a rock landscape that’s currently littered with faux white hip-hoppers and piss-poor rap-metal hucksters.

There’s a reason rapper Mos Def chose the name Jack Johnson for his new rock-and-roll band. Johnson was the first black world heavyweight boxing champion, a man known for giving it out \\a whole lot better than he took it in. He even once knocked five of his opponent’s teeth out with a single punch. He was a man fighting not only for his own dignity but also to knock white America off its haughty perch.

But Jack Johnson the man was not without his contradictions. He married a white woman. Twice. He owned a nightclub in Chicago and drove ostentatious cars. He sported gold teeth. His fervor for glamor almost outstripped his passion for demolishing the great white hopes of the era.

So it’s fitting that Mos Def, in his eagerness to punch his way into the arena of rock-and-roll race politics with Johnson’s pug-nacious anti-racism as his model, also put his own personal contradictions on display when he debuted his new band at last monýh’s Lyricist Lounge 2 CD-release party at New York’s Roseland Ballroom. Taking intellectual cues from his own take-back-the-rock polemic “Rock ’N’ Roll” (off his Rawkus/Priority 1999 solo debut, Black on Both Sides), Mos Def prowled the stage, microphone clutched tightly in his fist. Following a rather anodyne selection of underground rhymers, he had an unenviable mandate: to revive a largely uninspired crowd and open the history book to a fresh chapter, “The Black Rock Revival.”

For the evening’s lesson, Mos Def had assembled a cast of craftsmen that encapsulated the post–Jimi Hendrix evolution of black rock. Bernie Worrell, the Funkadelic veteran, manned the keys. Bad Brains founder Dr. Know strummed the guitar. And from Living Colour, who alongside ecstatic art-rockers Fishbone briefly spurred a black-rock movement in the late ’80s, Mos plucked drummer Will Calhoun and bassist Doug Wimbish.

With all that potential on one stage, it would seem a given that the black-rock fire would be relit, that the torch would be handed to Mos Def, and that the genres — hip-hop and rock — would be set to miscegenating. But if anything, Jack Johnson’s debut displayed the uncertain character of contemporary black rock, the public’s general ambivalence to the form, and Mos Def’s own hyper-ambition and penchant for showmanship.

As de facto bandleader, Mos Def could barely keep the stitches together. Instead of marshaling a coherent set, he allowed the band to veer from riff to riff, topic to topic; they landed more often than not on a cover tune or an interpretation instead of an original song. The set seemed like one long rehearsal. There was a revisionist version of the Police’s “Roxanne” near the outset, and a revisionist version of TV’s Batman theme song sung as “Black Man” toward the close. By the end, Jack Johnson had come off as a great unfulfilled concept that, despite Mos Def’s fire-and-brimstone delivery, isn’t likely to have any impact on a rock landscape that’s currently littered with faux white hip-hoppers and piss-poor rap-metal hucksters.

It’s a strange situation when you consider that, at its root, rock is black music. Unfortunately, the faces behind today’s most successful rap-rock fusions are decidedly white — a slew of couldn’t-be frat boys who listened to a few N.W.A tapes and decided to start breaking stuff. It’s telling that the only person more interested in kicking down the wall between rock and rap than Mos Def is Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst. Of course, Mos would just as soon keep it insular: “I ain’t trying to dis, but I ain’t trying to fuck with Limp Bizkit, ” he proclaimed from the Roseland stage.

It’s just as telling that, whereas the color line in hip-hop is being blurred by white faces like Eminem, Mos Def has to contend with a rock world that remains hostile or indifferent to black faces. To Mos, Fred Durst represents everything that’s wrong with contemporary rock. And though Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water ýFlip/Interscope) might not be the first place Mos Def should look to as an example of rap rock at work (even if rappers from Xzibit to Method Man seem plenty content to let Durst play crossover publicist for them), there are other releases worth examining — maybe Mos should take a listen to Everlast’s Eat at Whitey’s (Tommy Boy) for a glimpse at a better black rock tomorrow.

Yeah, it’s bad form to give a white guy like Everlast credit for revamping black rock. I can hear Mos right now chomping at my ear, reprimanding me — “Elvis Presley ain’t got no soul/Chuck Berry is rock & roll/You may dig on the Rolling Stones/But everything they did, they stole,” is how he put it in “Rock N Roll.” Remember, though, Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan and the Beatles as easily as he did Chuck Berry. And we all know it was the white Jewish songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller who composed “Hound Dog” for Big Mama Thornton before Elvis Presley turned it into a crossover smash.

The truth is, it’s ex-pat white rappers like Everlast who’ve been forced to seek out new post-hip-hop musical ground. Given that their race makes their fingerhold on the “real” tenable at best, they’ve had to try out new ideas or risk commercial failure. For Everlast, that meant presenting himself as a modern-day bluesman on his 1998 album Whitey Ford Sings the Blues (Tommy Boy). And he found new uses for the authenticity so valued by hip-hop, telling tales of loss and fear, redemption and strength. His follow-up, Eat at Whitey’s, continues to explore those blues traditions, though this time around he’s more content to let the rock ow. On “Whitey,” the opener, he posits himself as an urban folk hero. “What, you thought I stopped rhyming, because I started singing,” he challenges. “Picking on a six-string, wrist bling-blinging.” In Everlast’s world, he can have his rock and beat-box it too. On the very next track, he acknowledges his role as an object of scorn. “They call me white devil, black Jesus,” he moans — either way, he’s a threat.

Nowhere is that more evident than on his cover of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story.” Accompanied by human groovebox Rahzel, Everlast breathes surprising life into a classic that hardly seemed in need of an update. His gruffalo style preserves the song’s grim undertone without removing its fundamental sense of humor. This is a skill he also put to work on his morose interpretation of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Part II,” from the largely misguided Loud Rocks (Columbia) album. A collection of rock covers of hip-hop songs from the Loud catalogue, in most cases helped out by the original rappers themselves, Loud Rocks merely proves the futility of cross-genre pollination. Over its 13 tracks, only Everlast and Butch Vig’s band Grunge Is Dead tap into the raw energy of their source material. Everywhere else, B-list acts from Static-X to Incubus (and even poor Ozzy Osbourne) attempt to capture the energy of the originals but end up trampling all over their tracks with unwieldy musical feet.

Loud Rocks proves that covering hip-hop isn’t the simple affair one might expect. Few people, unfortunately, paid much attention to the 1997 collection of hip-hop covers In tha Beginning . . . There Was Rap (Priority), or the 1998 compilation N.W.A Straight Outta Compton: 10th Anniversary Tribute (Priority). Poorly thought out and even more sloppily executed, these releases showed how hard it is for rappers to cover other rappers. Which means there’s no reason to think the path to black rock is to let a bunch of meatheads — black or white — with guitars act out their down-with-the-scene fantasies. Rap cover projects like Rebirth of the Loud (Priority) and Take a Bite Outta Rhyme . . “ (Republic/Universal) were doomed from the start, even if the latter did include Dynamite Hack’s clever almost-spoof of N.W.A’s “Boyz N the Hood.”

Something better could perhaps be expected of Zack de la Rocha and his fellow genre slummers in Rage Against the Machine. De la Rocha’s desire to be a rap MC, as opposed to a rock ranter, has been patent these past few years, whether he was muscling his way through a tour with the Wu-Tang Clan (until it imploded) or kicking rhymes alongside KRS-ONE and the Last Emperor on the first installment of the Lyricist Lounge project. Combine this yearning with Rage’s ability to craft rock music that attacks political issues while actually snapping necks and it would seem that Rage (even without Zack) could indeed create a viable, crossover form of black rock. Their latest, Renegades (Epic), nods in that direction, with its rock covers of hip-hop classics, from Eric B. & Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend” and EPMD’s “I’m Housin’ ” to the lesser-known “Pistol Grip Pump,” by LA underground veteran Volume 10.

Yet on this, Rage’s least political of records, de la Rocha’s ideology sticks out like a sore activist. His nasal rant is so intimately linked with theories of resistance and uplift that its application to some of hip-hop’s seedier subject matter rings utterly false. As he worms his way through “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” Cypress Hill’s decidedly unpretty take on wanton street vengeance, the sound of Zapatista rebels running for the hills is almost palpable.

So if rockers can’t look to rap for their cues to credibility and relevance, then where does the future of black rock lay? In fact, it’s taken a pair of rappers and a spoken-word demon to lead the way. “I will not rhyme over tracks/Niggas in the chain gMng used to do that/Way back” — so asserted Saul Williams, star of the movie Slam and one-time New York performance poet about town, on his stunning 1998 single “Twice the First Time.” Now trying out tracks from his as-yet-untitled debut album for American, he’s assembled a formidable live outfit whose members range from cellist to DJ (there’s even a painter at some shows). This material proves one thing: you don’t have to be able to sing to be a rock star — it’s as much a philosophical position as an æsthetic one. “Do You Know” and “She’s Out of My Life” are as powerful as any other rock entreaties out there, and Williams pulls them off with nary a key in sight. Instead, he couples a psychedelic funk sensibility with a gravitas-laden delivery. Their union is more vital than most any other music being made today.

Except for OutKast. Yet again, Atlanta’s finest play the odd man out, the exception to every musical rule. Over their four albums, Andre 3000 and Big Boi have displayed an increasing reliance on sounds typically excluded from the hip-hop palette. On Stankoniaý(La Face/Arista), their excursions into rock may merely be the dabbles of artists learning a new medium, but even those fitful steps are cause for rejoicing. “Gasoline Dreams,” the album’s most vibrant guitar workout, finds Dre taking a turn as crooner: “All of my heroes did dope . . . I can’t cope.” Dre is a man who dreams about black rockers, from Hendrix to Prince, so it’s no surprise he laments their downfall, or bites their style. Damned if “Ms. Jackson” isn’t a stolen Prince reel. And if “?” and “Slum Beautiful” tickle your Sly Stone jones, then you’re well on the path to redemption.

Unlike the mighty Mos Def, OutKast realize that the black-rock legacy isn’t to be worn like a set of gold teeth and a fur coat. It needs to be noodled over, played through, and earned. Turns out the “power music, electric revival” that’s toasted on the outro to “Bombs over Baghdad” isn’t hip-hop after all. It’s rock and soul.