The thread for late 80s/early 90s black funk-rock (Living Color, 24-7 Spyz, Urban Dance Squad, etc.)

I guess Rage Against the Toaster are the elephant in the room here, but man what an odd pop culture moment this was

also Fishbone!

at the time it seemed so obvious that this was a direction pop music was going to go - funk metal! - and then it really *did* go there (after all these bands, to be clear) and the results were... sad.

Yeah Fishbone and Bad Brains def the early adopters

There was an underground of this in the 80s, but it wasn't just black bands, because the Red Hot Chili Peppers were arguably THE band for that trend. Mentally, I actually associate Fishbone as belonging to a scene with them, rather than to a scene of black funk rock bands in general -- both bands having carried a torch from punk a la Bad Brains and Minutemen, but also P-Funk and James Brown. When Living Colour hit it big -- and that band had a lot closer ties to jazz and old school black rock like Jimi Hendrix -- you started seeing bands like 24-7 Spyz get signed. But I never really lumped Living Colour in the same music grouping with Fishbone per se.

it's interesting to me how much Living Color and 24-7 Spyz feel like almost political, legacy-reclamation type projects. Funkadelic records were long out of print by this point, and you could see these bands doing some very obvious dot-connecting (Jimi Hazel lol), kind of trying to hand-hold their prospective audiences into discovering this stuff. Which kind of worked in my case at least, I mean I had never heard the original "Jungle Boogie", I heard 24-7 Spyz' version first. Feel like Living Color's cover of "Memories Can't Wait" also falls in here somewhere, front-loading the connection between Talking Heads and their African/black music influences.

not sure how the day-glo bike pants fit into this.

Vernon Reid's guitar tone on those Living Colour records is really something else, I've never heard anyone sound like that since

man why was Living Colour spelled with a "u" anyway, I totally forgot that

I think I first heard "On the Corner" because of Vernon Reid name-checking it (might've been that + an issue of Motorbooty)

tack>>head entered this groove for a while.

in fact there was crossover between living colour and tack>>head if memoory serves me right (doug w on bass for both bands ?)

xpost

I was into a lot of old funk, but I think it's true that part of that might be because I wanted to check out the stuff that had supposedly influenced bands I liked such as RHCP and Fishbone. Living Colour, for me, was always more of a straight up rock thing. Like, in 1990, they were basically a new Led Zeppelin for me. I think they played up a historical/political angle in a lot of their songs and album imagery -- but then so did Fishbone, the main difference being that Fishbone seemed a lot angrier/satirical, and also a lot more obsessed with sex. LC was a more PC band, and (maybe not coincidentally) their stuff hasn't aged as well IMO.

in this thread, the real outlier band was Urban Dance Squad, because especially on their first record, they really didn't sound like the other bands, and brought in more of an electronic aspect. I should go back and listen to that again, wonder how it's aged.

https://www.facebook.com/Black-Rock-Coalition-83748180988/?fref=ts

Black Rock Coalition is still in effect and recently put out a free 30th anniversary comp that I have downloaded but not yet listened to.

Would love it if someone uploaded "Spyz on Piano" to youtube.

Fishbone seemed a lot angrier/satirical, and also a lot more obsessed with sex.

A high school classmate dismissed them as "horny hippies".

Fishbone was def goofier, closer to RHCP in that way.

I really can't stand RHCP these days, just no desire to ever hear any of their shit ever. Fishbone I still have some affection for, they seem like they need it.

xpost

I'd go with horny punks, who also played funk and ska and listened to Rush, but yeah. Partly because of that, I also think they had the closest spiritual ties to P-Funk

Yeah, I think his opinion was influenced by the Everyday Sunshine video, where they're boppin around in a field of flowers.

xposts...

I just went back and revisited the Living Colour catalog last month (not the reunion stuff, only the debut through the Biscuits EP, which was like 15 tracks long in Japan btw). Instrumentally they were great, but man, Corey Glover was one of the worst singers around. Tremendous technical skill but absolutely zero human feeling - he was this giant Broadway-style ham trying to be soulful in the most melismatic, overblown way possible. He ruins literally every song.

They were definitely a whole different thing than Fishbone, too. At least half of the Living Colour dudes were to some extent or another affiliated with the Downtown NYC avant-garde or jazz in general, and the band itself was an outgrowth of Vernon Reid's networking project, the Black Rock Coalition.

Fishbone were unbelievable in their heyday (roughly 1984-1994, but really 1988-92). I got to see them three or four times around the time of The Reality of My Surroundings and they were just mind-blowing live.

haha to this day I still hear "24! 7! Spyz!" in my head when i see that name

remember going to the first Lollapalooza and Living Colour kinda torched all the other bands, they did this hyper tech version of "Sailin' On" by Bad Brains

And re: Urban Dance Squad, I had a big revival of Life and Perspectives of a Genuine Crossover in the late 90s, but haven't revisited it since I dropped cassettes.

I didn't like Living Colour at Lollapalooza at all, mostly due to Glover.

I saw 24-7 Spyz once, too; they called as many audience members up to the stage as would fit for their last song, and the club owner freaked out and cut the power.

xpost

In retrospect, it's on wonder the Chili Peppers were the breakout stars of that scene. They were the basketball party, wacky funtime version of punk-funk. I mean "Basketballpartywackyfuntime" coulda been a b-side for them at some point...

And otm, never could stand Corey Glover as a vocalist.

i remember urban dance squad dude had a charlie brown shirt i thought that was cool

I bought a charlie brown shirt because of uds.

how much can we blame subsequent top 40 rap-rock hybrids on this stuff? I wonder how Vernon Reid feels about, say, Limp Bizkit lol.

Feel like Infectious Grooves also belongs here altho they were kinda sad and I don't recall if they actually had any black members(?) And Body Count! Although they were more of a straight-up metal band.

xxp

lol @ "Basketballpartywackyfuntime"

Rocky George contributed to the first IG album but was not a member.

Feel like Infectious Grooves also belongs here altho they were kinda sad and I don't recall if they actually had any black members(?) And Body Count! Although they were more of a straight-up metal band.

Body Count were great. Their first album sold based on sensationalism, but they actually became a better band on later releases. Their most recent disc, with an almost entirely new lineup, was one of my favorite albums of 2014.

I think you can "blame" quite a lot of 90s rap-rock on this stuff, in the sense that before grunge, rap+rock fusion was kinda viewed as the future of pop music. Ha, didn't Chuck Eddy have this massive theory about disco metal fusion around then? (tho I always thought he was predicting NIN, not this stuff)

IMO the last great gasp of this idea, before "rap rock" became basically pejorative, was the Judgement Night soundtrack.

before grunge, rap+rock fusion was kinda viewed as the future of pop music

this is def my memory, it just seemed logical/inevitable

Early faith no more are kinda connected to all this amirite?

Early faith no more are kinda connected to all this amirite?

Except for a) kicking out their only black member and b) being utter shit from Day One to the present, yeah.

had no idea Mike Morris was black...

Who's Mike Morris? I was referring to singer Chuck Mosely.

their first singer

obviously I didn't know Mosely was black either lol

xpost

Definitely crossover in fans. What was cool about these bands is beyond the fact they were playing real "fusion" music, they were tying together a lot of disparate scenes. My memory of seeing Living Colour and Fishbone back in the day was that that audience (and my group of friends who went) were alternately metalheads, indie types (or what us fogeys might called "alternative"), classic rock guys and regular old college kids who'd probably be at Coachella today.

That was really the thing, as far as biz trends in the 90s went -- where "crossover" was a dream of the future in the 70s and 80s, it was the primary goal in the 90s.

oh, and also brings to mind King's X

Momentum for the band Follow For Now peaked and fizzled around this time, shame I never got to see them in concert. Audio of one live track linked here on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql6baP_WND0

(sorry for the embed)

Fishbone live on SNL was a mindblowing experience. I heard some of their studio stuff and it didn't sound like...that

Is Follow For Now referenced in Bring the Noise or was it the other way around?

that audience (and my group of friends who went) were alternately metalheads, indie types (or what us fogeys might called "alternative"), classic rock guys and regular old college kids who'd probably be at Coachella today

begs the question of where their black audience was or did any of these bands even have a black audience, really

thread reminds me of dust junkys.
the homezone party begins.

I understand people's problems with Glover, but I thought he was great the one time I saw Living Colour, in a small club in 1989; the band was LOUD and if he had taken it down a few notches he would have been blown off the stage by Reid

I was sure they got their name from Bring the Noise, but actually can't confirm that, xxxp how's life

xpost

Fishbone on record didn't really start to sound good until Truth & Soul imo (tho their initial EP captures their goofy ska side pretty well) -- tracks like "Bonin in the Boneyard" give a pretty good indication of what they were about live, but then on subsequent records, they got way heavier, and even more absurd/schizo in their aesthetic. I listened to Reality of My Surroundings late last year, and the production is horrendously dated, but you can still hear how much energy is going into the performances.

begs the question of where their black audience was or did any of these bands even have a black audience, really

that was talked about even then -- I don't think so, at least no more so than any popular indie band would have today. I recall a quote from a model who'd appeared in a Fishbone video, about how surprised she was that the band was so "black" IRL

begs the question of where their black audience was or did any of these bands even have a black audience, really

I definitely recall black folks in the crowd when I saw Fishbone in NY/NJ, and at a couple of BRC shows I went to at CBGB.

Oh man this was my shit for a while. I had gotten into punk rock in 8th grade (1987/88), hip-hop in 9th, and got way into Hendrix and Led Zeppelin in 10th. So when I started reading about these bands in 1990/91, on paper it sounded like the perfect distillation of everything I loved.

I always felt like Fishbone and RHCP were different for some reason; I had gotten into them via skateboard videos so they had this happier ska/funk California vibe to them vs. the metal vibe from Living Colour and 24-7 Spyz. But still, I was so into finding stuff that combined funk and rap and metal and punk - Primus, Infectious Grooves, looking records by bands like the Limbomaniacs and Psychefunkapus because they got mentioned in Primus liner notes.

But I have no desire to ever hear any of this ever again for the most part. Still love Truth and Soul and the Reality of My Surroundings though.

ugh Primus. has any band ever misunderstood funk so thoroughly.

Also I believe I high-fived Corey Glover at Lollapalooza as he ran up and down the aisle. I remember thinking he was super short, and I believe he was probably wearing a neon wetsuit.

re: audience demographics now that I think about it the lone black guy in my college social circle was way into all this stuff

Why does black people never want to rock?

here's the thread you guys are all looking for

well, not exactly

Yeah pretty much xpost

this thread is about specific bands/scene that thread is about... something else

Like 2 comments in, somebody called the Bad Brains funk-rock so uh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaXikmzQX_I

funk-rock progenitors Bad Brains

let's check out some early funk-rock from Fishbone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwX0fkGf5rA

like are you guys even thinking for a nanosecond about the music you're actually talking about and the scenes these bands existed in as opposed "oh yeah all these bands had black people and guitars, ergo FUNK-ROCK" because right now it seems like you are not

?

take it up w Dominique (who also clearly distinguished Bad Brains and Fishbone as doing *something different* than the bands I cite in the thread title)

lol xp

xpost

thought I mentioned how I'm thinking about this upthread -- but I'm writing about it as I experienced it, which is a loose scene that also include RHCP, Faith No More/Mr Bungle, later Primus, even the Beastie Boys with Check Your Head. Basically, heavy music that had cool beats, usually great musicianship and some punk chaos.

RHCP, Faith No More/Mr Bungle, later Primus, even the Beastie Boys with Check Your Head

you (and I) might've been listening to all this stuff at the same time but these bands are not really like 24-7 Spyz and Living Colour.

well no, not really -- but I guess I'm just working w the constraints of this thread. Like I said before, even then, I didn't really consider Fishbone and LC as all that like-minded (and 24-7 Spyz, though I did buy their records, I always considered kinda 2nd tier).

I had no idea Angelo Moore and Moseley were both members of BRC so there is some direct connection there for those guys.

Also I forgot about these folks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-iko11WgXk

Melvin Gibbs, bassist for Eye & I, was later in the Rollins Band, and has done a bunch of other cool shit - his group Harriet Tubman is fantastic.

I claimed Living Colour as my "favorite band" during the Vivid and Time's Up era. They were my first concert, at U. Maryland. I kind of lost interest when Wimbish left and they put out that red jewel case record that I didn't think was that great, and transitioned into grunge and fugazi. I liked Fishbone a lot too, esp the first record.

LA had other funk/alt rock groups. Jane's Addiction, Marys Danish and Thelonius Monster were in same circles as rhcp and Fishbone. Royal Crescent Mob from Cincy also had that funk/alta rock hybrid sound. I think the Pfunk influence really trancended race.

i first heard Living Colour when they appeared on Saturday Night Live and they were AMAZING

Jane's Addiction, Marys Danish and Thelonius Monster were in same circles as rhcp and Fishbone

we all know this but 4/5ths of those bands were white

king's x is a prog metal band iirc

x-post -- I think you eman you lost interest when Wimbish JOINED? Muzz Skillings played (brilliantly) on the records you named.

muzz skillings is one of the greatest names of all time

Sry yes total brainfart

. I kind of lost interest when Wimbish left and they put out that red jewel case record

(suspect "left" = "joined").

aha - the tack>>head connection as mentioned earlier !
i have that red jewel case album hidden deep.
not listened to it in years ..

xpost.

oh come on, "Pay to Cum" Bad Brains isn't directly relevant to this discussion but I Against I-era Bad Brains totally is

Quickness-era even more so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGUugYvB4S0

Uh

Reggae and/or ska is still not the same thing as funk.

I was happy to see someone mention Follow for Now. I have no idea why Huntsville, AL was a regular stop on their touring circuit, but I must have seen them 6-8 times in the first couple years of the nineties. Always an intense time.

there's more funk than reggae happening in those late-80s Bad Brains albums

as a self-conscientious, self-righteous teenage record collector who thought he knew better than SST-ites and Guns and Roses fans, I certainly had a sense that in the 1980s that "rock" i.e. G/B/D bands should not by severed from black culture. So I will happily admit to being a RHCP fan, and think that any act mentioned above is part of a movement in which black music of the past 10-15 years was embraced, being that there was a widespread view among "rock" people of various stripes that recent, post-blues or post-Stax iterations of black music were hideous pandering commercial crap (Michael Jackson) or that hip-hop was not real music etc etc…

So vernon reid comes along and says "it shouldn't be weird that black folks are doing 'rock music,' and I though "yeah, he's right, I'm going to support his band." But the thing is it was tell tell tell with his band, and very little show. Bad brains was all show, and that is the act that I listen to very often out of all the above, certainly never Living Colour. otherwise, it seems fairly sophomoric to insist in the 1980s that Prince and hip-hop were somehow insufficient in any sense of "rock and roll" that has any value at all and that black musicians had to compete on, like, Van Halen or the Godfathers turf (first time I saw LC, they were opening for the cloddish latter) to be considered authentic.

while I certainly understand the indignity that RHCP has been doing middling "eagles with slap bass" for so many years, being up there with Foo Fighters in terms of "modern/active rock stations will play their new shit, no questions asked," it is somewhat unfortunate that the band is often mentioned in the same breath as Creed or Nickelback (also two acts I do not dislike entirely). I saw them every chance I got in the late 80s/ early 90s, before Frusciante got fucked up, and I have warm feelings about 'em.

it is a little mean to have bad brains on this thread. most of this stuff was terrible. i watched bill & ted's bogus journey last night with cyrus and primus were in that. and one of the guys from faith no more for some reason. that movie is so fucked up.

I'm sorry I didn't police the funkiness of this thread better the other day. It's just that when people voluntarily want to discuss things like 247 Spyz and UDS, I tend to lose my shit.

Living Colour, from my memory, was mostly unfunky as well. Was it just Funny Vibe from the first album? Time's Up opened it up a little more if I recall correctly. I don't know. I don't have access to the records at the moment. But what stuck with me from Living Colour was Vernon Reid's rock riffage.

i made the mistake of buying a thelonious monster album in 1986 and i vowed that nothing like that would ever happen to me again.

I was into a lot of the music mentioned here, except for 27-7 Spyz perhaps, I loved the first few UDS records.

I got exposed to a French band called FFF [french funk federation] who were like UDS but with a more of a Funkadelic influence, at least visually.

I saw them live at the Subterranea in London, myself and a few hundred french ex-pats, and they were super entertaining in the same way as Fishbone. I don't know how well they stand up to scrutiny now though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWE8jqxrWrw

we talked about things relevant to this on a body count thread, I found it and stand by what I said there:

it was fab when Ice T brought out Body Count at the first Lollapalooza shows (I saw it in ATL, expect he did it everywhere) because it felt like a gigantic 90s-hippie moment, like rap & metal can coexist & we can all get along, in being pissed off but also having a party doing it, so fucking open minded, & it still feels like we lost something crucial when all that kind of, I dunno, I want to say "multicultural", idealism kinda fell away with grunge & gangster in 92. at least that shit matters a lot to me still. i.e. Fishbone forever

― Euler, Thursday, August 23, 2012 4:22 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

& to push on the possibly racially ~problematic~ aspects of singling this (non)-"scene" out : as a Latino kid in the late 80s, into rock but wondering where someone like him might fit in, this "scene" was the happiest thing. there wasn't any "Latino rock scene" to speak of (obv Los Lobos & they meant a lot but they're not a scene, despite whatever Paul Simon thought). & the indie shows, the crowds were so white, so alienating to me, subliminal fascism; but the bands we're talking about in this thread opened this all up, & I don't think this is just my corny thing, I think it's what we're feeling, what's normal anyway, like looking back why was I so into Cypress Hill, those aren't albums that have that much to give, but seeing a face like that, instead of I dunno evan dando or whatever, it meant a lot.

Oh man those first two cypress hill albums are *so good* tho

yeah but they're not Fishbone good

Euler -

Were you into Latin alternative rock in the late '80s/early '90s? Maldita Vecindad, Café Tacuba, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, bands like that? I remember hearing that Jane's Addiction brought Maldita Vecindad to L.A. for a show and honestly if I could have been at any show that year, that would have been it. I didn't get to see them live until the mid-2000s when they reunited and played Central Park SummerStage, and they were phenomenal.

no I didn't know any of that stuff at the time, I lived in the suburbs of Atlanta, maybe if I'd read the right magazines I'd have learned about them but as it was I was pretty dependent on word of mouth which, where I lived, meant indie rock, or radio, which meant rap, hard rock, and country; or good promoters, bringing that Primus / Fishbone bill to Georgia State for $5! & Los Lobos to a military airport hangar for $5.

http://www.spin.com/2008/10/black-rock-oral-history/

you see in this thing that the likes of Angelo Moore and 24/7 Spyz speak about being affected by the resistance of black folk to their shit more than white folks and their annoyance with the dominance of EWF and Kool & the gang R&B band paradigm. But for all I know, David Browne included certain quotes to make whichever point he wanted and maybe didn't use what he didn't want to—at this time, he was contributing a bunch of putrid rockist dogma to Spin.

Whoah v interesting thx for that. Raised my eyebrows at this:

When black people hear music that’s past a certain tempo, they have to think too much to dance to it, so they don’t try.

Yeah that was a wtf. Interesting piece, though. Thread got me to pull out Vivid, which was welcome.

For the record i have almost zero genuine affection for any of the bands in the original post (tho i was casually interested at the time). Its the sociocultural phenomenon thats most interesting to me.

Interview with Jeff Brodnax,who replaced P Fluid on vocals for the Spyz in the early 90s.

http://www.afropunk.com/m/blogpost?id=2059274%3ABlogPost%3A534344

Went googling up whatever happened to P. Fluid (Peter Forrest). Most recent thing I can find about him is this number from 2008 with Corey Glover and Angelo Moore. Its...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qce_uYEVdCQ