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

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