One of the biggest frustrations for any serious music fan is the continued support - by the music industry if not by fans - of segregation. There is white folks rock, and then there is black folks hip-hop and r&b. If you want a fix of one kind or another, you have to scan the music dial, from "AOR" to "Urban Contemporary" and back again.
Following on this "market segmentation", is the really dumb way the press and industry treats those folk who cross genres. White folk doing rap is big news - the first act Madonna signed to her new label in the mid-1980's was The Beasties Boys; Vanilla Ice was, for a brief moment, considered a serious artist. Black folk doing serious rock, though, is an anomaly, a fluke, maybe even a novelty, the equivalent of such songs as "Purple People Eater". Certainly nothing to be taken seriously. Living Colour? Aren't they cute - the lead singer even dresses like a surfer don't you know and how many black folk surf I mean really?
Bad Brains melded two very obvious music styles, reggae and punk, and came up with a hard, even blistering sound, full of both rage and protest. They received . . . zero air play. Not only because they were different. They were a bunch of black guys doing punk and everyone knows no one wants to hear that! Sadly, most of their audience was white, which only further throws in to relief the ongoing belief that African-Americans aren't rockers. Here they are in Reading, England doing their song "Rise Up".
Another group that followed Bad Brains in melding reggae and dub with hard core, introduced to me by my friend Jim Bush-Resko, is Fishbone. First, here they are doing a cover of the Curtis Mayfield song, "Freddie's Dead":
Here they are just plain rocking out in Essen, Germany in 1993 with their song, "Swim". That riff sounds straight out of Metallica, doesn't it?
One of the saddest chapters in the history of the music industry was the treatment by their label of the hardcore band Body Count. Founded by rapper Ice-T as an outlet for his love of heavy metal and punk, they produced a song entitled "Cop Killer" that was highlighted by former US Vice President Dan Quayle. In the ensuing controversy, Body Count's label pulled the song from future pressings, and it is almost impossible to find anymore. They persevered, however, and Body Count still records and tours, in between Ice-T's growing acting career, including a role as a . . . police officer! This song is "There Goes The Neighborhood" - a direct assault on the very phenomenon I am writing about here.
